Part 9

But this is not the whole of the story. The very strength and efficiency of Henry’s government were sure to produce a reaction in favor of feudal liberties in which his sons serve simply as convenient centres of crystallization. Only time could unify each of these dominions internally, while far more time was required to consolidate them into a permanent kingdom, and these processes were interrupted when they had barely begun. Such a solution of the ultimate problem of consolidation was, we have seen, entirely possible and even natural; but another was possible and also natural, namely the union of these territories under the king of France. Geography, as well as history, favored the second alternative.

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The geographical unity of France is one of the most obvious facts on the map of Europe. The Alps and the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, are its natural frontiers; only on the northeast are the lines blurred by nature and left to history to determine. Within these limits there are of course many clearly marked subdivisions--the valleys of the Rhone, Garonne, Loire, and Seine, Gascony, Brittany, Normandy, Flanders, and the rest--which formed the great fiefs of the Middle Ages and the great provinces of later times. Sooner or later, however, as population increased, as trade and commerce developed, and as the means of communication were strengthened, these divisions were certain to draw together into a single great state. Where the centre of the new state would lie was not a matter of accident but was largely determined by the great lines of communication, and especially by the commercial axis which runs from the Mediterranean to Flanders and the English Channel. On this line are situated the Roman capital of the Gauls, Lyons, and the modern capital, Paris. This fact, combined with the central and dominant position of the Paris basin in relation to the great valleys of the Seine, the Loire, and the Meuse, established the region about Paris, the Ile-de-France of history, as the natural centre of this future nation. Such a state might grow from without toward its centre, as the modern kingdom of Italy closed in on Rome, but the more natural process was from the centre outward, as England grew about Wessex or Brandenburg about the region near Berlin. In the great contest between Capetian and Plantagenet the Capetian “held the inner lines.” Shut off from the sea on the side of the Loire as well as on the side of the Seine, he was in a position to concentrate all his efforts to break through the iron ring, while the Norman rulers had to hold together the whole of their far-spread territories against reaction and rebellion at home as well as against the French at Tours and LeMans and in the Vexin. Meanwhile up and down these valleys the influences of trade, commerce, and travel were at work breaking down the political barriers and drawing the remoter regions toward the geographical centre. The rivers in their courses fought against the Plantagenets.

The personal element in the struggle was weighted against the Anglo-Norman empire even more strongly than the physiographic, for the weak links in the Plantagenet succession ran parallel to the strongest portion of the Capetian line. Against a knight-errant like Richard and a trifler like John, stood a great European statesman in the person of Philip Augustus, king of France during forty-four years, and more than any single man the creator of the French monarchy.

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Philip Augustus was not an heroic figure, and to the men of his age he was probably less sympathetic than his adversary Richard. Vigorous and enduring, a generous liver, quick-tempered but slow to cherish hatred, Philip was preëminently the cautious, shrewd, unscrupulous, far-sighted statesman. He could fight when necessary, but he had no great personal courage and excelled in strategy and prevision rather than in tactics or leadership in the field, and he preferred to gain his ends by the arts of diplomacy. The quality upon which all his contemporaries dwell is his wisdom. Throughout his long reign he kept before him as his one aim the increase of the royal power, and by his patient and fortunate efforts he broke down the Plantagenet empire, doubled the royal revenue and more than doubled the royal domain, and made France the leading international power in western Europe.

As we have already seen, Philip had made substantial headway even during the lifetime of Henry II. Crowned in 1179 at the age of fourteen, a year before the death of his paralytic father Louis VII, Philip was naturally treated as a boy by Henry, who seems, however, to have acted throughout with due regard to Philip’s position as king and his feudal suzerain. In the complications of those early years we find Henry constantly arranging disputes with the king’s vassals and more than once saving him from a tight place. But as time went on this relation became impossible. Philip openly abetted the revolts of the Young King and of Richard, and in the war which broke out at the end Richard fought openly on his side. As soon, however, as Richard succeeded to the throne, Philip began hostilities with him, and he soon used John against Richard as he had used Richard against his father. “Divide and rule,” was clearly Philip’s policy, and he always had on his side the fact that he was king in France and the Plantagenets on the Continent were his vassals.

The first phase of the contest between Richard and Philip comes as a welcome interlude in the tale of border disputes and family rivalries which make up the greater part of the tangled story of Philip’s dealings with the Norman empire. It takes us over the sea to the fair land of Sicily and on to the very gates of the Holy City. In 1187 the capture of Jerusalem had crowned the long efforts of the great Saladin, and where a century before Christian knights had ridden “up to their bridles” in the blood of the slaughtered Moslem, a procession of knights and priests and poorer folk passed out of the gate of David and left the Holy Sepulchre to the infidel. To the Saracens a certain sign that they were the only people “whose doctrine was agreeable to God,” the fall of Jerusalem killed the aged Pope, plunged Europe into prayer and fasting, and brought on the Third Crusade, under the leadership of the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Philip of France, and Richard of England. Richard, then merely count of Poitou, was the first western prince to take the cross in this holy war; his father and Philip soon sealed their crusading vows with a public reconciliation under a great elm on the borders of Normandy and France, and the chroniclers tell us that every man made peace with his neighbor, thinking no more of tournaments and fine raiment, the lust of the flesh and the pride of the eye, but only of the recovery of the Holy City. Such great waves of renunciation and religious enthusiasm are peculiarly characteristic of the Middle Ages, but their force was soon spent. Then, as in other times, there were few who could live as on a mountain-top. In spite of all that the church could do, Henry and Philip soon came to open war, and the cause of Jerusalem was swallowed up in a struggle for the Loire and for Aquitanian fortresses. Richard, as we have seen, was a central point in these conflicts, and his accession to the throne simply continued the struggle in another form.

Nevertheless a peace was patched up, and the unwilling Philip was unable to hold aloof from the crusade which fired the military ardor of his chief vassal and rival. Large sums of money were raised by every means, and the two kings made an agreement to divide equally all the spoil of their expedition. They also arranged to go by sea to the East after they had assembled their ships and followers at Messina, thus avoiding the usual complications with the Eastern Empire and the fatal march through the barren and hostile interior of Asia Minor which now claimed another victim in the gallant German emperor. At the best, however, a crusade was not an organized campaign under efficient direction, but merely a number of independent expeditions which found it convenient to go at the same time and by the same route. There was no supreme command, and there was constant jealousy and friction between feudal lords who were ever impatient of restraint and careful of points of dignity and precedence. The presence of a king was of some help, the presence of two only made matters worse. If the causes of rivalry at home and the slighting of Philip’s sister could have been forgotten, there was still the fact that Richard was Philip’s vassal as well as his equal, and Richard was not of the type to spare Philip’s susceptibilities. Rich, open-handed, fond of display, Lion-Heart “loved the lime-light,” and his overbearing nature and lack of tact made it impossible for him to coöperate with others. He characteristically went his own way, paying scant attention to Philip and acting as if the leadership of the expedition belonged to himself as a matter of course. Relations became strained during the sojourn at Messina and grew worse in Palestine, where the affairs of the Latin kingdom and the rivalries of lesser princes added fuel to the flame. “The two kings and peoples,” says an English chronicler, “did less together than they would have done separately, and each set but light store by the other.” Sick of the whole enterprise, after four months in the East, Philip seized the first excuse to return home, departing in August, 1191.

Richard stayed a year longer in Palestine, yet he never entered Jerusalem and had finally to retire with a disappointing truce and to spend another year, and more, languishing in German prisons. The events of these months do not concern the history of Normandy, but if we would behold Richard in his fairest light we must see him as he rushed to the relief of Joppa on the first of August, 1192, wading ashore from his red galley with the cry, “Perish the man who would hang back,” covering the landing of his followers with his crossbow, making his way by a winding stair to the house of the Templars on the town wall, and then, sword in hand, clearing the town of three thousand Turks and pursuing them into the plain with but three horsemen; or, four days later, repelling a Mameluke attack in force by a most skilful tactical arrangement of his meagre army, directing the battle on the beach while he also kept the town clear, “slaying innumerable Turks with his gleaming sword, here cleaving a man from the crown of his head to his teeth,” there cutting off with one blow the head, shoulder, and right arm of a Saracen emir, his coat of mail and his horse bristling with javelins and arrows like a hedgehog, yet “remaining unconquerable and unwounded in accordance with the divine decree.”[43]

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What most concerned the Norman empire was the king’s absence since the summer of 1190, prolonged by his captivity in Germany until the spring of 1194. Although Philip had taken an oath before leaving Palestine to respect Richard’s men and possessions during his absence, and even to protect them like his own city of Paris, he sought release from this engagement as soon as he reached Rome on his homeward journey, and once back in France he soon began active preparations for an attack on the Plantagenet territories. With Richard safe in a German dungeon, he seized a large part of the Norman border and made a secret treaty with John which secured the surrender of all the lands east of the Seine and important fortresses in Anjou and Touraine. He offered huge sums of money to secure Richard’s custody or even his continued detention in Germany, and when early in 1194 he warned John that “the Devil was loose” at last, he was besieging the great fortress of Verneuil on the Norman frontier. When Richard landed at Barfleur in May, amid the ringing of bells and processions singing “God has come again in his strength,” it is small wonder that he came breathing vengeance and slaughter, and that the rest of his life is a record of scarcely interrupted war against the king of France. For many years he is said to have refused the sacrament lest he might have to forgive his enemy. Again and again he had Philip on the run. Once Philip lost all his baggage and saved himself by turning aside to hear mass while Richard rode by; on another occasion Richard drove the French into Gisors so that the bridge broke under them “and the king of France drank of the river, and twenty of his knights were drowned.”

Such scenes, however, are only the striking episodes in a series of campaigns which are confused and complicated and do not lend themselves to clear narration. Decisive engagements were rare, each side seeking rather to wear out the other. Money was spent freely for allies and mercenaries--a contemporary called the struggle one between the pound sterling and the pound of Tours, and the advantage was on the side of the pounds sterling by reason of their greater number. There was usually a campaign in the spring and summer, ending in a truce in the autumn which the church tried to prolong into a lasting peace but which soon broke down in a new war. The wars were for the most part border forays, in which the country was burned and wasted far and wide, to the injury chiefly of the peasants, upon whom the burden of mediæval warfare mainly fell. “First destroy the land, then the enemy,” was the watchword. Booty and ransom were the object as well as military advantages, so that even the contests between knights had their sordid side, so definitely were they directed toward taking profitable prisoners; while feudal notions of honor might cause Richard to put out the eyes of fifteen prisoners and send them to Philip under the guidance of one of their number who had been left one eye, whereupon Philip blinded an equal number of knights and sent them to Richard under the guidance of the wife of one of them, “in order,” says his eulogist,[44] “that no one should think he was afraid of Richard or inferior to him in force and courage.”

The brunt of the war fell on Normandy and ultimately on the castles which supplied the duchy’s lack of natural frontiers. To supplement the great interior fortresses of Caen, Falaise, Argentan, Montfort, and Rouen, Henry I began the organization of a series of fortifications on the southern and eastern borders. Henry II, we are told, improved or renewed nearly all these strongholds, and especially Gisors, the frontier gateway toward France, on which fortress the exchequer roll shows him expending 2650 pounds Angevin in a single year. These castles, remains of many of which are still standing, were typical of the best military architecture of their age, but they were inferior in strength and scientific construction to the great fortresses of Christian Syria, such as Krak or Margat, which seem to have gone back to Byzantine and even Persian models. A keen warrior like Richard had not spent his two years in Palestine without gaining an expert knowledge of eastern methods in the art of war, and we are not surprised to find that he had Saracen soldiers and Syrian artillerymen with him in his Norman campaigns, and that he made large use of oriental experience in strengthening his defences. His masterpiece, of course, was Château Gaillard, the saucy castle on the Seine controlling the passage of the river and its tributaries in that region of the Norman Vexin which was the great bone of contention between the Plantagenets and the French kings. Having first expropriated at great expense the lord of the region, the archbishop of Rouen, he fortified the adjacent island of Andeli and laid out a new town on the bank. This he surrounded with water and reënforced with towers and battlements, protecting the whole with a stockade across the river and outlying works farther up. Then on the great rock above he built the fortress, with its triangular advance work, its elliptical citadel, and its circular keep surrounded by a “_fossé_ cut almost vertically out of the rock.” There was no dead angle, such as permitted sappers to reach the base of rectilinear walls, but instead a sloping base down which projectiles might ricochet; nor was there, as at the corners of square towers, any part of the surrounding area which could not be reached by direct fire from within. “The approaches and the _fossé_,” says Dieulafoy,[45] “were covered by the fire of the garrison right up to the foot of the scarp, and no sapper could touch any point in towers or walls, provided that the fortress was under the direction of an experienced commander.” This qualification is important, for the new type of fortification was designed for an active defence, one might almost say an offensive defence, and not for the mere passive resistance with which the older strategy had been content. The works at Andeli, carried on largely under Richard’s personal direction, occupied more than a year of labor and cost nearly 50,000 pounds Angevin, which we find distributed in the royal accounts over lumber and stone and hardware, and among masons and carpenters and stone-cutters and lesser laborers.

By the year 1199 Richard had recovered his Norman possessions save Gisors and certain castles on the border, where Philip never lost his foothold, and he had raised an effective barrier to French advance in the valley of the Seine. Strong allies were on his side, and the diplomatic situation was decidedly in his favor. Never had Philip been so hard pressed, and even the friendly legate of the Pope could secure for him nothing better than the retention of Gisors in the truce which was then drawn up. And then a second stroke of fortune, greater even than the captivity of 1192, came to Philip’s aid. Richard, impetuous and headstrong as ever, spoiled all by a raid on an Aquitanian rebel in which he lost his life. His energy, his military skill, and his vivid personality had concealed the fundamental weakness of his position against France; his removal meant the swift fall of the Norman empire.

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At Richard’s death there were two possible successors, his younger brother John, whom he had designated heir, and his nephew Arthur, son of his elder brother Geoffrey and duke of Brittany. There was enough uncertainty in feudal law to admit of a plausible case for either one, but Arthur was only twelve and John quickly took possession, being crowned at Rouen in April and at Westminster in May. Arthur, however, had the following of his Bretons and, what was more important, the support of Philip Augustus, who used Arthur against John as he had used John against Richard and Richard against his father. Philip confirmed Arthur as count of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine, and soon brought him to Paris, where he was betrothed to Philip’s daughter. Nevertheless the course of events at first favored John. Philip was in the midst of the great struggle with Pope Innocent III over the divorce of his queen Ingeborg, and a treaty was signed in 1200, by which, on giving up territory in the Norman border and in central France and paying a large relief of 20,000 marks for his lands, John was confirmed in his control of Anjou and Brittany, while a visit to Paris, where he was splendidly received, seemed to crown the reconciliation. In a position, however, where all possible strength and resourcefulness were required, John’s defects of character proved fatal. No one could depend upon him for loyalty, judgment, or even persistence, and he quickly earned his name of “Soft-Sword.”

Meanwhile the legally-minded Philip, while spending money freely on John’s followers and abating nothing of his diplomatic and military efforts, brought to bear the weapons of law. The revival of legal studies in the twelfth century had given rise in western Europe to a body of professional lawyers, skilled in the Roman and the canon law, and quick to turn their learning to the advantage of the princes whom they served. Philip had a number of such advisers at his court, and they doubtless contributed to the more lawyerlike methods of doing things which make their appearance in his reign; but it was feudal custom, and not Roman law, that he used against John. In law John was Philip’s vassal,--indeed, he had just confessed as much in the treaty of 1200,--and as such was held to attend Philip’s feudal court and subject himself to its decision in disputes with other vassals. It might be urged that the king of England was too great a man to submit to such jurisdiction, and that the duke of Normandy had been in the habit of satisfying his feudal obligations by a formal ceremony at the Norman frontier; still the technical law was on the side of the king of France, and a suzerain had at last come who was able to translate theory into fact. In the course of a series of adventures in Poitou John carried off the fiancée of one of his barons of the house of Lusignan, who appealed to his superior lord, the king of France. All this was in due form, but Philip was no lion of justice eager to redress injuries for justice’ sake. He waited nearly two years, John’s visit to Paris falling in the interval, and then, when he was ready to execute sentence, promptly summoned John before the feudal court of peers. John neither came nor appeared through a representative, and the court in April, 1202, declared him deprived of all his lands for having refused to obey his lord’s commands or render the services due from him as vassal. The capture of Arthur temporarily checked Philip; the boy’s murder by John in the course of 1203 simply recoiled on the murderer. Whether this crime led to a second condemnation by the court of peers, as was alleged by the French at the time of the abortive invasion of England in 1216, is a question which has been sharply discussed among scholars. What has now become the orthodox view holds that there was no second condemnation, but a clever case has recently been made by Powicke, who, minimizing the importance of the accepted argument from the silence of immediate contemporaries, argues, on the basis of the _Annals of Margam_, that there probably was a second condemnation in 1204. After all, the question is of subordinate importance, for Philip’s effective action was based on the trial of 1202, and by 1204 John’s fate was already sealed.

The decisive point in the campaign against Normandy was the capture of Château Gaillard, the key to the Seine valley, in May, 1204, after a siege of six months which seems to have justified its designer, save for a stone bridge which sheltered the engineers who undermined the outer wall. Western Normandy fell before an attack from the side of Brittany; the great fortresses of the centre, Argentan, Falaise, and Caen, opened their gates to Philip; and with the surrender of Rouen, 24 June, 1204, Philip was master of Normandy. John had lingered in England, doing nothing to support the defense, and when he crossed at last in 1206 he was obliged to sign a final surrender of all the territories north of the Loire, retaining only southern Poitou and Gascony. Gascony and England were united for two centuries longer, but the only connection was by sea. The control of the Seine and the Loire had been lost, and with that passed away the Plantagenet empire.

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