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Henry the First was the son of William the Conqueror. On the death of his brother William Rufus he seized the English crown, though the eldest of the family, Robert, was still alive. Robert was fond of fighting without the responsibility of command, and delighted to be religious without the troubles of a religious life. He therefore joined the First Crusade to gratify this double desire, and mortgaged his dukedom of Normandy to Henry to supply him with horses and arms and enable him to support his dignity as a Christian prince at Jerusalem. His dukedom he never could recover, for his extravagances prevented him from repayment of the loan. He tried to reconquer it by force, but was defeated at the battle of Tinchebray, and was guarded by the zealous affection of his brother all the rest of his life in the Tower of London. He left a son, who was used as an instrument of assault against Henry by the Suzerain of Normandy, Louis the Sixth, King of France. Orders were issued to the usurping feudatory to resign his possessions into the hands of the rightful heir; but, however obedient the Duke of Normandy might profess to be to his liege lord the King of France, the King of England held a very different language, and took a different estimate of his position. |A.D. 1153.|And in the time of the second Henry a change took place in their respective situations which seemed to justify the assumptions of the English king. That grandson of Henry the First had opposed his liege lord of France by arms and arts, and at last by one great master-stroke turned his own arms upon his rival and strengthened himself on his spoils. In the Second Crusade the scrupulous delicacy of Louis the Seventh of France had been revolted by the indiscreet or guilty conduct of Eleanor his wife. He repudiated her as unworthy of his throne; and Henry, who had no delicacies of conscience when they interfered with his interest, offered the rejected Eleanor his hand; for she continued the undoubted mistress of Poitou and Guienne. No stain derived from her principles or conduct was reflected in the eyes of the ambitious Henry on those noble provinces, and from henceforth his Continental possessions far exceeded those of his suzerain. The other feudatories, encouraged by this example, owned a very modified submission to their nominal head; and the inheritors of the throne of the Capets were again reduced to the comparative weakness of their predecessors of the Carlovingian line. Yet there was one element of vitality of which the feudal barons had not deprived the king. A fief, when it lapsed for want of heirs, was reattached to the Crown; and in the turmoil and adventure of those unsettled times the extinction of a line of warriors and pilgrims was not an uncommon event. Even while a family was numerous and healthy the uncertain nature of their possession deprived it of half its value, for at the end of that gallant line of knights and cavaliers, slain as they might be in battle, carried off by the pestilences which were usual at that period, or wasted away in journeys to the Holy Land and sieges in the heats of Palestine, stood the feudal king, ready to enter into undisputed possession of the dukedoms or counties which it had cost them so much time and danger to make independent and strong. In the case of Normandy or Guienne themselves, Louis might have looked without much uneasiness on the building of castles and draining of marshes, when he reflected that but a life or two lay between him and the enriched and strengthened fief; and when those lives were such desperadoes as Richard and such cowards as John, the prospect did not seem hopeless of an immediate succession. But the French kings were still more fortunate in being opposed to such unamiable rivals as the coarse and worldly descendants of the Conqueror. The personal characters of those men, however their energy and courage might benefit them in actual war, made them feared and hated wherever they were known. They were sensual, cruel, and unprincipled to a degree unusual even in those ages of rude manners and undeveloped conscience. Their personal appearance itself was an index of the ungovernable passions within Fat, broad-shouldered, low-statured, red-haired, loud-voiced, they were frightful to look upon even in their calmest moods; but when the Conqueror stormed, no feeling of ruth or reverence stood in his way. When he was refused the daughter of the Count of Boulogne, he forced his way into the chamber of the countess, seized her by the hair of her head, dragged her round the room, and stamped on her with his feet. Robert his son was of the same uninviting exterior. William Rufus was little and very stout. Henry the Second was gluttonous and debauched. Richard the Lion-Heart was cruel as the animal that gave him name; and John was the most debased and contemptible of mankind. A race of gentle and truthful men, on the other hand, ennobled the crown of France. The kings, from Louis the Debonnaire to Louis the Seventh, or Young, were favourites of the Church and champions of the people. The harsh and violent nobility despised them, but they were venerated in the huts where poor men lie. The very scruple which induced Louis to divorce his wife, whose conduct had stained the purity of the Crusade, almost repaid the loss of her great estates by the increased love and respect of his subjects. |A.D. 1180.|And when the line of pure and honourable rulers was for a while interrupted by the appearance, upon a throne so long established in equity, of an armed warrior in the person of Philip Augustus, it was felt that the sword was at last in the hands of an avenger, who was to execute the decrees of Heaven upon the enemies whom the moderation, justice, and mercy of his predecessors had failed to move.

But before we come to the personal relations of the French and English kings we must take a rapid view of one of the great incidents by which this century is marked,—an incident which for a long time attracted the notice of all Europe, and was productive of very important consequences within our own country. Hitherto England had played the part of a satellite to the Court of Rome. Previous to the quarrels with France, indeed, one great tie between her and the Continental nations was the community of their submission to the Pope. Foreigners have at all times found wealth and kind treatment here. Germans, Italians, Frenchmen, any one who could make interest with the patrons of large livings, held rank and honours in the English Church. |A.D. 1154-1159.|Little enough, it was felt, was all that could be done in behalf of foreign ecclesiastics to repay them for the condescension they showed in elevating Nicholas Breakspear, an Anglo-Saxon of St. Alban’s, to the papal chair. But Nicholas, in taking another name, lost his English heart. As Adrian the Fourth, he preferred Rome to England, and maintained his authority with as high a hand as any of his predecessors. Knights and nobles, and even the higher orders of the clergy, were at length discontented with the continual exactions of the Holy See; and in 1162 the same battle which had agitated the world between Henry the Fourth of Germany and Gregory the Seventh was fought out in a still bitterer spirit between Henry the Second of England and Thomas à-Beckett. All the story-books of English history have told us the romantic incidents of the birth of the ambitious priest. It is possible the obscurity of his origin was concealed by his contemporaries under the interesting legend, which must have been a very early subject for the fancy of the poet and troubadour, of a love between a Red-Cross pilgrim and a Saracen emir’s daughter. It shows a remarkable softening of the ancient hatred to the infidels, that the votaress of Mohammed should have been chosen as the mother of a saint. But whatever doubt there may arise about the reality of the deserted maiden’s journey in search of her admirer, and her discovery of his abode by the mere reiteration of his name, which is beautifully said to be the only word of English she remembered, there is no doubt of the early favour which the young Anglo-Saracen attained with the king, or of the desire the sagacious Henry entertained to avail himself of the great talents which made his favourite delightful as a companion and indispensable as a chancellor, in the higher position still of Archbishop of Canterbury and Comptroller of the English Church. For high pretensions were put forward by the clergy: they insisted upon the introduction of the canon laws; they claimed exemption from trial by civil process; they were to be placed beyond the reach of the ordinary tribunals, and were to be under their own separate rulers, and directly subject in life and property to the decrees of Rome.

Henry knew but one man in his dominions able to contend in talent and acuteness with the advocates of the Church, and that was his chancellor and friend, the gay and generous and affectionate à-Beckett. So one day, without giving him much time for preparation, he persuaded him to be made a priest, and at the same moment named him Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of all England. Now, he thought, we have a champion who will do battle in our cause and stand up for the liberties of his native land. But à-Beckett had dressed himself in a hair shirt and flogged himself with an iron scourge. He had invited the holiest of the priests to favour him with their advice, and had thrown himself on his knees on the approach of the most ascetic of the monks and friars. All his fine establishments were broken up; his horses were sent away; his silver table-services sold; and the new archbishop fasted on bread and water and lay on the hard floor. Henry was astonished and uneasy; and he had soon very good cause for his uneasiness, for his favourite orator, his boon-companion, his gallant chancellor, from whom he had expected support and victory, turned against him with the most ruthless animosity, and pushed the pretensions of Rome to a pitch they had never reached before. Nobody, however he may blame the double-dealing or the ambition of à-Beckett, can deny him the praise of personal courage in making opposition to the king. The Norman blood was as hot in him as in any of his predecessors. When he got into a passion, we are told by a contemporary chronicler, his blue eyes became filled with blood. In a fit of rage he bit a page’s shoulder. A favourite servant having contradicted him, he rushed after the man on the stair, and, not being able to catch him, gnawed the straw upon the boards. We may therefore guess with what feelings the injured Plantagenet received the behaviour of his newly-created primate. He stormed and raged, terrified the other prelates to join him in his measures for curbing the power of the Church, chafed himself for several years against the unconquerable firmness of the arrogant archbishop, and finally failed in every object he had aimed at. The violence of the king was met with the affected resignation of the sufferer; and at last, when the impatience of Henry gave encouragement to his followers to put the refractory priest to death, the quarrel was lifted out of the ordinary category of a dispute between the crown and the crozier: it became a combat between a wilful and irreligious tyrant and a martyred saint. It requires us to enter into the feelings of the twelfth century to be able to understand the issue of this great conflict. In our own day the assumptions of à-Beckett, and his claims of exemption from the ordinary laws, have no sympathizers among the lovers of progress or freedom. But in the time of the second Henry the only chance of either, in England, was found under the shelter of the Church. That great establishment was still the only protection against the lawless violence of the king and nobles. The Norman possessors of the land were still an army encamped on hostile soil and levying contributions by the law of the strong hand. Disunion had not yet arisen between the sovereign and his lords, except as to the division of the spoil. The Crusades had not depopulated England to the same extent as some of the other countries in Europe; and the wars of the troubled days of Stephen and Matilda, though fatal to the prosperity of the land, and destructive of many of the nobles on either side, had attracted an immense number of high-born and strong-handed adventurers, who amply supplied their place. The clergy had been forced to retain their original position as leaders of the popular mind, superintendents of the interests of their flocks, and teachers and comforters of the oppressed: à-Beckett, therefore, was not in their eyes an ambitious priest, sacrificing every thing for the elevation of his order. He was a champion fighting the battles of the poor against the rich,—a ransomer of at least one powerful body in the State from the capricious cruelty of Henry and the grasping avarice of the Norman spoliation. The down-trodden Saxons received with the transports of gratified revenge any humiliation inflicted on the proud aristocracy which had thriven on the ruin of their ancestors. The date of the Conquest was not yet so distant as to hinder the feeling of personal wrong from mingling in the conflict between the races. A man of sixty remembered the story told him by his father of his dispossession of holt and field, on which the old manor-house had stood since Alfred’s days, and which now had been converted into a crenelated tower by the foreign conqueror. Nor are we to forget, in the midst of the idea of antiquity conveyed at the present time by the fact of a person’s ancestor having “come in with William,” that the bitterness of dispossession was increased in the eyes of the long-descended Saxon franklin by the lowness of his dispossessor’s birth. Half the roll-call of the Norman army was made up of the humblest names,—barbers and smiths, and tailors and valets, and handicraftsmen of all descriptions. And yet, seated in his fortified keep, supported by the sixty thousand companions of his success, enriched by the fertile harvests of his new domain, this upstart adventurer filled the wretched cottages of the land with a distressed and starving peasantry; and where were those friendless and helpless outcasts to look for succour and consolation? They found them in the Church. Their countrymen generally filled the lower offices, speaking in good Saxon, and feeling as good Saxons should; while the lordly abbot or luxurious bishop kept high state in his monastery or palace, and gave orders in Norman French with feelings as foreign as his tongue. But à-Beckett was an Englishman; à-Beckett was Archbishop of Canterbury, and chief of all the churchmen in the land. To honour à-Beckett was to protest against the Conquest; and when the crowning glory came, and the crimes of Henry against themselves attained their full consummation in the murder of the prelate at the altar,—the patriot in his resistance to oppression,—the enthusiasm of the country knew no bounds. The penitential pilgrimage which the proudest of the Plantagenets made to the tomb of his victim was but small compensation for so enormous a wickedness, and for ages the name of à-Beckett was a household word at the hearths of the English peasantry, as their great representative and deliverer,—only completing the care he took of their temporal interests while on earth by the superintendence he bestowed on their spiritual benefit now that he was a saint in heaven. Curses fell upon the head and heart of the royal murderer, as if by a visible retribution. His children rebelled and died; the survivors were false and hostile. Richard, who had the one sole virtue of animal courage, was incited by his mother to resist his father, and was joined in his unnatural rebellion by his brother John, who had no virtue at all. His mind, before he died, had lost the energy which kept the sceptre steady; and the century went down upon the glory of England, which lay like a wreck upon the water, and was stripped gradually, and one by one, of all the possessions which had made it great, and even the traditions of military power which had made it feared. John was on the throne, and the nation in discontent.

THIRTEENTH CENTURY

Authors

Roger Bacon, Matthew Paris, Alexander Hales, (Irrefragable Doctor,) Thomas Aquinas, (the Angelic Doctor.)

THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

FIRST CRUSADE AGAINST HERETICS – THE ALBIGENSES – MAGNA CHARTA – EDWARD I

The progress and enlightenment of Europe proceed from this period at a constantly-increasing rate. The rise of commercial cities, the weakening of the feudal aristocracy, the introduction of the learning of the Saracenic schools, and the growth of universities for the cultivation of science and language, contributed greatly to the result. Another cause used to be assigned for this satisfactory advance, in the discovery which had been made in the last century at Amalfi, of a copy of the long-forgotten Pandects of Justinian, and the reintroduction of the Roman laws, in displacement of the conflicting customs and barbarous enactments of the various states; but the fact of the continued existence of the Roman Institutes is not now denied, though it is probable that the discovery of the Amalfi manuscript may have given a fresh impulse to the improvement of the local codes. But an increase of mental activity had at first its usual regretable accompaniment in the contemporaneous rise of dangerous and unfounded opinions. Philosophy, which began with an admiration of the skill and learning of Aristotle, ended by enthroning him as the uncontrolled master of human reason. Wherever he was studied, all previous standards of faith and argument were overthrown. The cleverest intellects of the time could find themselves no higher task than to reconcile the Christian Scriptures with the decrees of the Stagyrite, for it was felt that in the case of an irreconcilable divergence between the teaching of Christ and of Aristotle the scholars of Christendom would have pronounced in favour of the Greek. A formulary, indeed, was found out for the joint reception of both; many statements were declared to be “true in philosophy though false in religion,” so that the most orthodox of Churchmen could receive the doctrines of the Church by an act of belief, while he gave his whole affection to Aristotle by an act of the understanding. When teachers and preachers tamper with the human conscience, the common feelings of honour and fair play revolt at the degrading attempt. Men of simple minds, who did not profess to understand Aristotle and could not be blinded by the subtleties of logic, endeavoured to discover “the more excellent way” for themselves, but were bewildered by the novelty of their search for Truth. There were mystic dreamers who saw God everywhere and in every thing, and counted human nature itself a portion of the Deity, or maintained that it was possible for man to attain a share of the divine by the practice of virtue. This Pantheism gave rise to numerous displays of popular ignorance and impressibility. Messiahs appeared in many parts of Europe, and were followed by great multitudes. Some enthusiasts taught that a new dispensation was opening upon man; that God was the Governor of the world during the Old Testament period; that Christ had reigned till now, but that the reign of the Holy Spirit was about to commence, and all things would be renewed. Others, more hardy, declared their adhesion to the Persian principle of a duality of persons in heaven, and revived the old Manichean heresy that the spirit of Hatred was represented in the Jewish Scriptures and the spirit of Love in the Christian; that the Good god had created the soul, and the Evil god the body,—on which were justified the sufferings they voluntarily inflicted on the workmanship of Satan, and the starvings and flagellations required to bring it into subjection. This belief found few followers, and would have died out as rapidly as it had arisen; but the malignity of the enemies of any change found it convenient to identify those wild enthusiasts with a very different class of persons who at this time rose into prominent notice. The rich counties of the South of France were always distinguished from the rest of the nation by the possession of greater elegance and freedom. The old Roman civilization had never entirely deserted the shores of the Mediterranean or the valleys of Languedoc and Provence. In Languedoc a sect of strange thinkers had given voice to some startling doctrines, which at once obtained the general consent. Toulouse was the chief encourager of these new beliefs, and in its hostility to Rome was supported by its reigning sovereign, Count Raymond VI. This potentate, from the position of his States,—abutting upon Barcelona, where the Spaniards, who remembered their recent emancipation from the Mohammedan yoke, were famous for their tolerance of religious dissent,—and deriving the greater portion of his wealth from the trade and industry of the Jews and Arabs established in his seaport towns, saw no great evil in the principles professed by his people. Those principles, indeed, when stripped of the malicious additions of his enemies, were not different from the creed of Protestantism at the present time. They consisted merely of a complete denial of the sovereignty of the Pope, the power of the priesthood, the efficacy of prayers for the dead, and the existence of purgatory.

The other princes of the South looked on religion as a mere instrument for the advancement of their own interests, and would have imitated the greater sovereigns of Europe, several of whom for a very slender consideration would have gone openly over to the standard of Mohammed. The inhabitants, therefore, of those opulent regions, by the favour of Raymond and the indifference of the rest, were left for a long time to their own devices, and gave intimation of a strong desire to break off their connection with the hierarchy of Rome. And no wonder they were tired of their dependence on so grasping and unprincipled a power as the Church had proved to them. More depraved and more exacting in this district than in any other part of Europe, the clergy had contrived to alienate the hearts of the common people without gaining the friendship of the nobility. Equally hated by both,—despised for their sensuality, and no longer feared for their spiritual power,—the priests could offer no resistance to the progress of the new opinions. Those opinions were in fact as much due to the vices of the clergy as to the convictions of the congregations. Any thing hostile to Rome was welcomed by the people. A musical and graceful language had grown up in Languedoc, which was universally recognised as the fittest vehicle for descriptions of beauty and declarations of love, and had been found equally adapted for the declamations of political hatred and denunciations of injustice. But now the whole guild of troubadours, ceasing to dedicate their muses to ladies’ charms or the quarrels of princes, poured forth their indignation in innumerable songs on their clerical oppressors. The infamies of the whole order—the monks black and white, the deacons, the abbots, the bishops, the ordinary priests—were now married to immortal verse. Their spoiling of orphans, their swindling of widows and wards, their gluttony and drunkenness, were chronicled in every township, and were incapable of denial. Their dishonesty became proverbial. The simplest peasant, on hearing of a scandalous action, was in the habit of saying, “I would rather be a priest than be guilty of such a deed.” But there were two men then alive exactly adapted to meet the exigencies of the time. One was a noble Castilian of the name of Dominic Guzman, who had become disgusted with the world, and had taken refuge from temptations and strife among the brethren of a reformed cathedral in Spain. But temptations and strife forced their way into the cells of Asma, and the eloquent friar was torn away from his prayers and penances and brought prominently forward by the backslidings of the men of Languedoc. The saturnine and self-sacrificing Spaniard had no sympathy with the joyous proceedings of the princes and merchants of the South. He saw sin in their enjoyment even of the gifts of nature,—their gracious air and beautiful scenery. How much more when the gayety of their meetings was enlivened by interludes throwing ridicule on the pretensions of the bishops, by hootings at any ecclesiastic who presented himself in the street, and by sneers and loud laughter at the predictions and miracles with which the Church resisted their attack! The unbelieving populace did not spare the personal dignity of the missionary himself. They pelted him with mud, and fixed long tails of straw at the back of his robe; they outraged all the feelings of his heart, his Castilian pride, his Christian belief, his clerical obedience. There is no denying the energy with which he exerted himself to recall those wandering sheep to the true fold. His biographer tells us of the successes of his eloquence, and of the irresistible effect of the inexhaustible fountain of tears with which he inundated his face till they formed a river down to his robes. His writings, we are assured, being found unanswerable by the heretics, were submitted to the ordeal of fire. Twice they resisted the hottest flames which could be raised by wood and brimstone, and still without converting the incredulous subjects of Count Raymond. His miracles, which were numerous and undeniable, also had no effect. Even his prayers, which seem to have moved houses and walls, had no efficacy in moving the obdurate hearts of the unbelievers; and at last, tired out with their recalcitrancy, the dreadful word was spoken. He cursed the men of Languedoc, the inhabitants of its towns, the knights and gentlemen who received his oratory with insult, and in addition to his own anathemas called in the spiritual thunder of the Pope.

This was the other man peculiarly fitted for the work he had to do. His cruelty would have done no dishonour to the blood-stained scutcheon of Nero, and his ambition transcended that of Gregory the Seventh. His name was Innocent the Third. |A.D. 1207.|For one-half of the crimes alleged against those heretics, who, from their principal seat in the diocese of Albi, were known as Albigenses, he would have turned the whole of France into a desert; and when, with greedy ear, he heard the denunciations of Dominic, he declared war on the devoted peasants,—war on the consenting princes; a holy war—more meritorious than a Crusade against the Turks and infidels—where no life was to be spared, and where houses and lands were to be the reward of the assailants. All the wild spirits of the age were wakened by the call. It was a pilgrimage where all expenses were paid, without the danger of the voyage to the East or the sword of the Saracen. Foremost among those who hurried to this mingled harvest of money and blood, of religious absolution and military fame, was the notorious Simon de Montfort, a man fitted for the commission of any wickedness requiring a powerful arm and unrelenting heart. Forward from all quarters of Europe rushed the exterminating emissaries of the Pope and soldiers of Dominic. “You shall ravage every field; you shall slay every human being: strike, and spare not. The measure of their iniquity is full, and the blessing of the Church is on your heads.” These words, sung in sweet chorus by the Pope and the Monk, were the instructions on which De Montfort was prepared to act; and what could the sunny Languedoc, the land of song and dance, of olive-yard and vineyard, do to repel this hostile inroad? Suddenly all the music of the troubadours was hushed in dreadful expectation. Raymond was alarmed, and tried to temporize. |A.D. 1208.|Promises were made and explanations given, but without any offer of submission to the yoke of Rome: so the infuriated warriors came on, burning, slaying, ravaging, in terms of their commission, till Dominic himself grew ashamed of such blood-stained missionaries; and when their slaughters went on, when they had murdered half the population in cold blood, and ridden down the peasantry whom despair had summoned to the defence of their houses and properties, the saintly-minded Spaniard could no longer honour their hideous butcheries with his presence. He contented himself with retiring to a church and praying for the good cause with such zeal and animation that De Montfort and eleven hundred of his ruffians put to flight a hundred thousand of the armed soldiers of the South, who felt themselves overthrown and scattered by an invisible power. Yet not even the prayers of Dominic could keep the outraged people in unresisting acquiescence. Simon de Montfort was expelled from the territories he had usurped, and found a mysterious death under the walls of Toulouse in 1218.

|A.D. 1223.|

The old family was restored in the person of Raymond the Seventh, and preparations made for defence. But Louis the Eighth of France came to the aid of the infuriated Pope. Two hundred thousand men followed in the holy campaign. All the atrocities of the former time were renewed and surpassed. Town after town yielded, for all the defenders had died. Pestilence broke out in the invading force, and Louis himself was carried off by fever. Champions, however, were ready in all quarters to carry on the glorious cause. Louis the Ninth was now King of France, and under the government of his mother, Blanche of Castile, the work commenced by her countryman was completed. The final victory of the crusaders and punishment of the rebellious were celebrated by the introduction of the Inquisition, of which the ferocious Dominic was the presiding spirit. The fire of persecution under his holy stirrings burnt up what the sword of the destroyer had left, and from that time the voice of rejoicing was heard no more in Languedoc: her freedom of thought and elegance of sentiment were equally crushed into silence by the heel of persecution. The “gay science” perished utterly; the very language in which the sonnets of knight and troubadour had been composed died away from the literatures of the earth; and Rome rejoiced in the destruction of poetry and the restoration of obedience. This is a very mark-worthy incident in the thirteenth century, as it is the first experiment, on a great scale, which the Church made to retain her supremacy by force of arms. The pagan and infidel, the denier of Christ and the enemies of his teaching, had hitherto been the objects of the wrath of Christendom. This is the first instance in which a difference of opinion between Christians themselves had been the ground for wholesale extermination; for those unfortunate Albigenses acknowledged the divinity of the Saviour and professed to be his disciples. It is the crowning proof of the totally-secularized nature of the established faith. Its weapons were no longer argument and proof, or even persuasion and promise. The horse up to his fetlocks in blood, the sword waved in the air, the trampling of marshalled thousands, were henceforth the supports of the religion of love and charity; and fires glowing in every market-place and dungeons gaping in every episcopal castle were henceforth the true expositors of the truth as it is in Jesus. Fires, indeed, and dungeons, were required to compensate for the incompleteness, as it appeared to the truly orthodox, of the vengeance inflicted on the rebels. The Abbot of Citeaux, who gave his spiritual and corporeal aid to the assault on Beziers, was for a moment made uneasy by the difficulty his men experienced in distinguishing between the heretics and believers at the storm of the town. At last he got out of the difficulty by saying, “Slay them all! The Lord will know his own.” The same benevolent dignitary, when he wrote an account of his achievement to the Pope, lamented that he had only been able to cut the throats of twenty thousand. And Gregory the Ninth would have been better pleased if it had been twice the number. “His vast revenge had stomach for them all,” and already a quarter of a million of the population were the victims of his anger. Every thing had prospered to his hand. Raymond was despoiled of the greater portion of his estates, the voice of opposition was hushed, the castles of the nobles confiscated to the Church; and yet, when the treaty of Meaux, in 1229, by which the war was concluded, came to be considered, it was perceived that the pacification of Languedoc turned not so much to the profit of Rome as of the rapidly-coalescing monarchy of France.