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the Pope and the people of the south, by which the CHAP. crown of France alone profited, was not indeed prevented, but deferred for a few years and a new reign.

The early success of the crusade against the Albigenses seemed to place all the crowns of Europe at the disposal of the Pope. Innocent the Third was not a pontiff likely to allow such power to slumber in his hands. He undertook to dethrone the Emperor Otho by raising up a rival; and John of England, in the midst of his other imprudences, having thought fit to brave the Pope's injunctions with respect to the nomination of an archbishop of Canterbury, Innocent forthwith excommunicated him, and made a present of England to Philip Augustus. This monarch was nothing loth to accept the present. John was not a very formidable enemy, as Philip had fully proved; and in the spring of 1213, the French king, in imitation of William the Conqueror, summoned his barons to Soissons, to decide upon and prepare for a descent upon England. The French barons were eager for the enterprise and the spoil. The only recalcitrant was Ferrand or Ferdinand, Count of Flanders, who complained that he had been unjustly despoiled of St. Omer and Aire, and demanded their restitution. Ferrand owed the county of Flanders to Philip Augustus, who had given him in marriage Jeanne, daughter of Baldwin, and heiress of the county. The French court certainly chose the moment of the marriage to seize St. Omer; but Philip Augustus had some claim to it by right of his first wife, daughter of the Count of Flanders.

A French fleet and army assembled at Rouen, whilst John mustered 60,000 English upon Barham Downs, who, "had they had one heart and one soul," says Matthew Paris, "there was no prince under heaven that England might not have defied." John, however, had no soul wherewith to inspire an English army. He mistrusted his nobles, and was terrified by a prophecy to the effect

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that he should soon cease to be king. Whilst under the influence of this terror, a papal legate landed on the coast of Kent, and John, to propitiate him and ward off French invasion, made over himself and his realm as liege to the Pope. It remained for the legate, fully satisfied by this submission, to pacify the King of France: the latter complained that he had spent 60,000 livres in preparing the expedition. And Matthew Paris says he would have paid little attention to the injunctions of the legate, had he not been enraged against the Count of Flanders, and resolved to punish him. He brought his army forthwith to Boulogne, and there embarked for Gravelines, from whence he ordered his fleet to Dam, and led his troops to the reduction of Bruges and Ghent. Whilst thus engaged, an English fleet, under the Count of Boulogne and the Earl of Salisbury, assailed the French fleet at Dam, and destroyed it, to the number of upwards of a thousand of different kinds of craft. This disheartened Philip. He contented himself with taking away hostages from the several towns, as a guarantee for the payment of a certain sum, and then withdrew, keeping garrisons merely in Douai, Cassel, and Lille. The two last were recaptured by the Count of Flanders.

The King of France had deferred, not abandoned, his project of landing in England. His invasion of Flanders had alarmed the nobles of that region, especially the Duke of Brabant, father-in-law of the Emperor Otho. Otho. All had recourse to the emperor, who saw in Philip Augustus the most dangerous of his foes. The imperial crown of Germany was then disputed between Otho and young Frederic the Second, who had come from Sicily to claim the heritage of the Hohenstauffen, and one of whose first acts had been to apply for, and receive an assurance of, French aid. Frederic, at the close of 1211, had met Prince Louis, son of the French king, at Vaucouleurs, and had received from him

V.

20,000 marks to enable him to hold his ground in Ger- CHAP. many; Otho received a similar sum from King John; and thus was the quarrel of France and England mingled up with that of the competitors for the imperial dignity. The Emperor Otho, therefore, thought that, in striking a blow at Philip Augustus, he would not only save the Dukes of Brabant and Flanders, as well as his menaced relative of England, but would deprive Frederic of one of the allies he most depended

on.

The emperor, therefore, agreed to take the command of the army which the nobles of the Low Countries were to form, and lead it against France.

The French King on his side prepared to meet the storm. He despatched his son Louis with an ample force to oppose John, who had landed at La Rochelle, and advanced to Angers. The king himself mustered the forces of the communes or towns in the north of his dominions, and with these principally, prepared to resist the attack of the German Emperor. One is surprised to find in this war between feudal France and civic Flanders, the King of France at the head of an army principally composed of townsfolk, who distinguished themselves by valour in his behalf, whilst in the army which the German Emperor led for the defence of Flanders, the force seems to have been chiefly feudal, none but the citizens of Bruges being mentioned as present, and they being remarked solely for having been the first to retreat. Some of the magistrates of Ghent and Bruges even marched with the King of France, as did the militia of Amiens, who had once so strenuously opposed him. In fact Philip Augustus, as his reign advanced, had made himself the patron of municipal liberties and of the middle classes, and he was not zealously opposed by those even in Flanders, whose Count Fernando, a Portuguese, was probably ignorant or reckless of the means of propitiating them.

In the month of July, 1214, the Emperor Otho mus

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tered his army at Valenciennes. Lord Salisbury had brought what aid England could afford. The Count of Boulogne accompanied him, and Hugh de Boves, the inveterate enemy of Philip Augustus. The Dukes of Limburg, of Brabant, of Hainault, of Holland, led each his knights. The Duke of Burgundy, and the Count of St. Pol, the Viscount de Melun, were the principal barons on the side of the King of France. The armies met between Lille and Tournay, at a spot called Bovines, where a bridge passed a mill stream, not very distant from the future battle-field of Fontenoy. The first care of Philip Augustus was to have mass said. He showed some mistrust of his barons, which they repelled, especially the Count of St. Pol, who observed that he would show himself a "good traitor." St. Pol began the battle on the right, against the Flemish knights; and for several hours it was confined to these wings, ending by the defeat of the Flemings, and the capture of Ferrand, their count. Then the Imperialists advanced to attack the king, who was posted in the centre, and to protect whom the legion of the communes with the oriflamme flung themselves into the front. They were beaten back by the German knights, who reached the French king, and put him in imminent danger, some of the soldiers striving to drag him down with hooks. Philip Augustus was, however, valiantly defended; his men soon turned the tide, and placed Otho in the same danger from which Philip had been rescued. The people of Bruges were the first to fly, whilst the Brabançons fought to the last. Otho was obliged to retreat. The English made fierce resistance to the right; but they too were routed, and the Earl of Salisbury with the Count of Boulogne were made prisoners there, as Ferrand of Flanders had been in the other wing.

Nothing could be more complete than the victory of Bovines. The German Emperor was definitively

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worsted. The alliance between him, the King of Eng- CHAP. land, and the most powerful of the Flemish barons, had proved unable to make any impression upon France. The king's personal enemies, the Counts of Boulogne and Flanders, were in his power, and he conveyed them both finally to the dungeons of the Louvre. The popularity of Philip Augustus, moreover, was immense after the battle of Bovines. It was the first victory which the French felt and gloried in as a nation. With such an impulse and such advantages the king might have compassed any aim. Yet whether it was that age had benumbed his energies, or from some other cause, he reaped but small advantage from his triumph. He did not continue to push the war for the present against John, but granted him a truce, on his payment of a sum of money. And even Flanders he left to the government of the Countess Jeanne. The same moderation marked his policy as prompted him to reject the offer made at a later period, by Amaury de Montfort, to surrender to the crown of France his claims upon Languedoc.

Philip Augustus might indeed be well contented with what he had done for the monarchy. He received it bounded by the Epte, within a day's ride of Paris, and with merely disputed claims beyond the Loire. Touraine, Maine and Anjou, as well as Normandy, in the hands of a rival, left to France of the twelfth century but a subordinate portion of the country we now contemplate under the name. Philip Augustus, by means however unwarrantable, extended these same dominions to the ocean; whilst his policy, joined to the Pope's cruelty and greed, prepared the way for the adjunction of the whole south. At Bovines the hostility which threatened from the north was laid in the dust, and the whole of the coast acquired as far as Dunkirk. Whilst Artois, acquired earlier, was by that battle definitively

secured.