VIII. tary force nor the administrative science of the time. CHAP. were equal to the task of holding together and managing so vast a monarchy; and we shall find the kings of France throughout the fourteenth century chiefly employed in undermining and undoing all those works of despotism, aggrandisement, and of centralisation, which had progressed without interruption to the period which we have recounted. Even Philip the Fair, with all his skill and power, could not maintain either the absolute power or the empire which he had completed. He soon had Flanders torn from his immediate rule, and found himself compelled to call around him and consult those classes and those assemblies to which, in the commencement of his reign, he had not deigned to cominunicate intelligence, much less power. Notwithstanding the first brief quarrel between Philip the Fair and Pope Boniface, the latter had not ceased to shower favours upon the royal family of France. He canonized St. Louis, and promised to make Charles of Valois the first monarch of Christendom. That prince had journeyed to Rome, and espoused the granddaughter of Baldwin, Emperor of Constantinople. The Pope created him Imperial Vicar, and commanding the revenues of a French prince, he was to be the generalissimo of the Pope. Charles, who brought with him five hundred horse, and a proportionate number of infantry, first tried his efforts against Florence, into whose walls he was received, and from which he expelled the faction of the Bianchi. But unable to quell its discords, he thence transported his army to Sicily. Frederic of Aragon, king of that island, avoided any regular engagement with the French knights, but confining his efforts to a guerilla warfare, rendered the soil of Sicily untenable by its French invaders. Charles therefore patched up a peace and returned to France. The Italians said that he came to Florence as a pacificator CHAP. and excited war, whilst he went to Sicily as a warrior and achieved nothing but a disgraceful peace. Charles of Valois's hurried pacification and return from Italy was, no doubt, hastened by a fresh quarrel that had broken out between the Pope and the King of France. This more serious dispute sprung, as if by just retribution, from the joint conquest which King and Pope had in the last century made of Languedoc. During the crusade against Toulouse, when the northern French under De Montfort had proved unable to overcome the resistance of the Albigenses, the monks and prelates had become feudal chiefs, had appropriated castles and baronies with their titles. One of these was the County of Melgueil, then considered a fief of the church of Maguelonne, and of the Pope. The Count of Narbonne, the chief seigneur of the district, refused to acknowledge pope or prelate as suzerain of the fief. And similar disputes arose between the Count de Foix and De Saisset, bishop of Pamiers. This ecclesiastic had been archdeacon of diocese of the Narbonne, and seems to have been untaught and unaware of the great increase of reverence and dignity which had accrued to the kings of France. Boniface unluckily chose this man, in 1301, for his legate in France and his envoy at the court of Philip. De Saisset addressed the monarch in the tone and language often employed, and successfully, by churchmen in the preceding century. He treated the king as a sinner and a criminal, and reproached him with his treachery to the Count of Flanders. On another occasion he is said to have called him a false coiner. Philip the Fair, however prudent and astute, was still often precipitated by passion into most important acts. In a more circumstantial account of his reign and life, the cause of his fresh quarrel with the Pope and his future animosity to the Templars would be perhaps apparent; but much obscurity hangs over it. Un doubtedly his lawyers inspired him with exalted ideas of his royal supremacy. He was to them the Cæsar, the fountain of all law and right. And either feudal or ecclesiastical resistance to the sovereign, however warranted by the feudal traditions of the monarchy, were considered as treason by the exhumers and reverers of Justinian. On the other hand, Boniface entertained as overweening ideas of papal supremacy as Philip of kingly power. He showed on many occasions that he considered the Papacy entitled to dictate and overrule monarchs even in matters unconnected with religion. In one of his conversations with Pierre Flotte, the French chancellor, despatched to him by the king, Boniface asserted that his authority was both spiritual and temporal. "It may be so," replied Flotte, "but your holiness's right is a mere verbal one; my master's is the real authority." Such pretentions had been submitted to by powerful kings; but Philip was taught by his legists the full difference between temporal and spiritual; and he resolved to teach the popes the nature of a distinction which they evidently overlooked. When the Bishop of Panniers, therefore, thought fit to animadvert, and in uncourtly language, on several acts of the king's government, exclusively secular, the monarch's ire was raised. The bishop, though a Languedocian, affected to deny the king's authority in the south, and to maintain that he even held his episcopal lands of the Holy See, not of the crown. In former times when a king was aggrieved by his prelates, he could appeal, like Henry, to his knights to avenge him. Philip applied to his lawyers; and they immediately undertook to get up a prosecution against the Bishop of Pamiers. Nothing was more easy than to raise a score of accusations; and the parliament sent down two officers to collect testimony. In those days attestation of almost any crime might be obtained by the use of favour or intimidation. In the present cause witnesses not only CHAP. VIII. VIII. CHAP. repeated every imprudent speech of the bishop against the king, but furnished proofs of his endeavours to induce the barons of the south to league against the crown. It was the churchmen, in their proceedings against the Albigenses, who invented the mode of proving words or opinions of any kind to have emanated from the victims they wished to destroy. This system of procedure, by extorted and distorted testimony, was now turned against the clergy themselves. The Bishop of Pamiers was arrested, and with as little ceremony as one of his predecessors would have shown to a heretic. Brought before the king's court at Senlis, the bishop refused to answer, and he was committed to the guard nominally of the Archbishop of Narbonne, though really kept by the king in the bailiwick of Senlis. The legists were for proceeding at once to sentence and punishment. But the king refused, and sent his chancellor, Pierre Flotte, to request the Pope to deprive the bishop of his clerical character, in order that he might be punished by the secular arm. The Pope seems not to have awaited Flotte's arrival to address a letter to the king, invoking the universal immunity of prelates from arrest, and commanding him to liberate the Bishop of Pamiers, and allow him to proceed to Rome, the only tribunal before which a prelate could be tried. Boniface at the same time threatened Philip with the canonical consequence of violating the rights of the Church, and prepared for fulminating an interdict, by recalling what he had granted the King of France at the conclusion of the former quarrel, an exemption from such penalty in consequence of his raising subsidies upon the clergy. The Pope also forbade the king to proceed to the collation of any benefice; and he finally summoned the prelates, magistrates, and professors of France to proceed to Rome in the following November. The last menace was serious. The l'ope proposed VIII. holding a council of French clergy to inquire into the CHAP. conduct of the royal officers towards them, and to make manifest the encroachments and violence of which they had been guilty. It was a direct attempt against the French legists and parliament. The Pope also addressed a bull to the monarch himself, recapitulating every act of his misgovernment and injustice not only against the Church, but against nobles and people. He accused Philip of his exactions, of his prohibition to trade, of his adulteration of the coin, of his creating a system and a court of justice, in which he, the monarch, was at once the party and the judge. He told Philip not to be mad enough to imagine himself independent of his ecclesiastical superior, whose rights he so completely set at defiance. To the Pope alone, he asserted, belonged collation to benefices, yet whenever a papal appointment took place before a regal one, no account was taken of the former. Under pretext of the Regale the king's officers pillaged the Church and its revenues. The Pope would take counsel with the clergy of France upon all these grievances, and then pronounce judgment. The King of France might be present, if he desired, either in person or by deputy. Here was the Papacy and the Crown of France in as direct antagonism as had ever been Pope and Emperor. The collection of the royal ordonnances in the first year of the century bear witness to the monarch's anxious desire to conciliate his own clergy. Successive edicts guaranteed the churches of Normandy, of Languedoc, of Rheims, of Narbonne, against the encroachments of royal seneschals and baillis. And the great ordonnance of reform issued in 1302 contains many clauses in favour of the clergy. The policy of Philip the Fair was to protect them, like other classes of his subjects, in their rights, but at the same time make them contribute to the burdens and defence of the state. The Bishop of Pamiers was now released, but the king, |