15. Louis VII.
CHAPTER XV. Louis VII. (1137-1180)
Louis VII. succeeded, or came after, his father Louis VI. This king was still called Le Jeune (the Young), and it is the name by which he is known in history. All the kings of that time had names given them from something special about their look or behaviour, and not only kings but private people were distinguished in the same way, as many people were then without surnames, and a nickname of that sort was necessary to know apart two Johns, two Edwards, or any two people with the same Christian name. The custom was used for the kings, and certainly must have been necessary for them also, when a father and son had the same name and were ruling together.
Louis had been brought up under the care of the Abbot Suger(, of whom I spoke in the last chapter). He had seen a great deal of monks and Churchmen, and was inclined to look up to them and obey them in everything, more than it is fitting for a king to do. Suger, however, was the best adviser he could have had, and his reign began well. He and Eleanor were crowned, and every one was pleased to see the north and south of France bound together by this marriage.
Louis soon found, however, that the men of Aquitaine were not yet much inclined to submit to him. He had a quarrel with them, another with the King of England, and a third with the Pope, before he had been king for more than a year or two.
He wished, to persuade one of the nobles, who was his friend, to marry the sister of his own wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, in order that some lands which were hers might belong to a friend of the king. The difficulty was that the noble who was to have married this lady had already a wife to whom he had been married for some years.
Louis persuaded him to send away his wife and marry Eleanor's sister. Some of the bishops of France who were friends of the nobleman gave him leave to do this, and it was considered at that time that the clergy had the power of settling whether or not a marriage should be broken off, if either the husband or wife wished it to be so.
The brother of the poor lady who was thus sent away was a great nobleman called the Count of Champagne, and he, as may be imagined, was very angry at the way in which his sister was treated. He called upon the Pope to take her side, and the Pope, who had already quarrelled with Louis,( as I said before,) excommunicated the faithless husband and the bishops who had given him leave to send away his wife. Louis attacked the Count of Champagne, and there was war between them for some months. At last Louis attacked and took a place called Vitri, which he burned down. The flames destroyed a church into which thirteen hundred men, women, and children had gone for safety. They were all burned, and the king was near enough to hear their cries. Whether or not he had intended that they should be burned we do not know, but he afterwards repented deeply of his cruelty, and made a peace with the Count of Champagne and with the Pope. The Pope had put France under an interdict, forbidding any church service to beheld in any city where the king might be. A new Pope, who was chosen just at this time, on the death of the other, took off the interdict, and France was again at peace.
About this time news came to Europe that the kingdom of Jerusalem, which the Christians had set up in the East, was in danger. The Turks had watched their time, and had seen that the barons in the Holy Land were growing proud and turbulent, disobedient to their king, and not able to govern the people who should have been their subjects. One of the kings of Jerusalem had been killed by a fall from his horse, and had left his crown to a child of twelve years old, called Baldwin III. The Turks made use of the opportunity, suddenly attacked a large town named Edessa, killed many of the people who lived in it, and took away all their riches. The Christians were afraid that the Mahommedans might go on to other cities, and at last take from them all the country they had conquered in the reign of King Philip I. They called upon the Christians of the West to help them.
The Pope was anxious for another Crusade; his friend St. Bernard went from one town of France to another, preaching, as Peter the Hermit had done, of the cruelties of the Turks, and the misery of the Christians, and calling upon all good servants of the Pope to take the cross and set out for the Holy Land. Louis, who was young and fond of adventure, was easily persuaded to lead an army to Jerusalem. The Pope said as before, that the Crusaders should be forgiven for all their sins, and Louis hoped in this way to gain pardon for burning the church at Vitry, for which he still felt deep remorse. His faithful adviser Suger told him that his duty as a king was to stay at home and manage the affairs of his kingdom, but Louis would not listen to this; and he ordered that a great meeting should be held at a place called Vezelay, where St. Bernard should address the people, and persuade as many as possible of them to take the cross.
The meeting was held on Easter Day. Immense crowds of people gathered together and listened to Bernard's eloquent speech. Before he had gone far a cry rose of "Crosses ! crosses !" St. Bernard and the king, who was with him, gave away as many crosses as they had with them, and were even obliged to tear up some of their clothes to find stuff for more. After this Bernard went to Germany, and though he spoke Latin, so that the Germans could not understand what he said, his voice and his manner had such an effect upon them, that the Emperor Conrad and many of his chief noblemen took the cross at once.
Some of the Crusaders wished Bernard to lead the Crusade, but he remembered how Peter the Hermit had failed, and refused to do so. Louis, by the advice of the bishops and chief noblemen, made Suger regent, or ruler of the kingdom while he should be away, and set off for the Holy Land a few months after the meeting of Vezelay; the Emperor Conrad having gone on a short time before him.
This Crusade, which seemed to promise great success, caused the death of many thousands of people, but was of no use whatever. The Crusaders began to quarrel with the people of the countries through which they passed before they were out of Europe. The kings had made arrangements for having food supplied to their armies, but there were difficulties about finding enough for all, and the Crusaders, if they were not satisfied, took by force whatever they wanted from the people. When they reached Asia, their troubles grew worse. The German army, which was in front, lost its way, was attacked by the Turks, was completely defeated, and almost destroyed. The French king went on more carefully, but was also obliged to fight the Turks, and lost many of his best soldiers. The leaders of the army then found that they did not know their way, and their guides deserted them from fear of the Turks. The army was much hindered by the crowds of women and children who had insisted on going with their husbands and fathers to Jerusalem.
At last a man was found who knew his way through the country. He was a simple French knight named Gilbert, and to him was given full power over the whole army. He guided them safely, without being attacked by the Turks, to a town called Satalia, where there were some Christian soldiers, and where they could buy food. He then went back to his duties as a common soldier, and nothing more is known of him.
At Satalia the king was persuaded to desert his army and subjects. He left them to wander on as best they might on foot to Jerusalem, and himself, with his queen and some of his chief nobles, embarked in a few ships which they found there, and sailed to Antioch, from which town they travelled easily to Jerusalem. There Louis went to the chief church, prayed for pardon at the altar of the Sepulchre, and turned homewards, believing that he had done a great and good deed.
The poor pilgrims left at Satalia had been meanwhile in a state of the greatest misery. They had tried to make their way to Jerusalem, but found it impossible, as they were without food, and the Turks were in wait for them. The governor of Satalia would not allow them to come into the town, and many of them died of hunger; others had food given them by their enemies the Turks, who were moved to pity for them, and treated them more charitably than did their fellow-Christians. More than three thousand young men were persuaded by the Turks to become Mahommedans; most of the others died at last from illness or misery, or in battle.
Louis, on his way home, attacked a Turkish town named Damascus, and besieged it for some weeks, but then found that he was not strong enough to take it, and as he received letters from Suger in France, begging him to hasten home as fast as possible, he at last left the Holy Land and sailed for Europe. His subjects in France, who had heard how he had deserted the Crusaders, and how he was coming home without having taken any fresh towns or done anything to help the Christians in the East, were very angry with him. Some of them had wished to make his brother king instead of him, and would perhaps have done so but for the courage of the faithful Suger, who, with the help of St. Bernard and of letters from the Pope, had put an end to all disturbance by the time the king reached France. Louis had left his country with a hundred and fifty thousand pilgrims; he brought back, two or three hundred knights.
I know of only one good thing which came to the French from this Crusade. As the German army had been almost entirely destroyed, the few soldiers who remained out of it had joined the army of Louis, and the French had learned to look upon Louis as a King as great as the Emperor, and had begun to feel themselves to be a nation apart from the Germans or any other people.
Louis found his kingdom in a state better than that in which he had left it. Suger had brought all the affairs of the country into good order, and had even paid debts of the king's with money of his own. When Louis came back Suger left the government altogether, and went to live privately at his own home, first giving the king some good advice, which Louis would have done well to follow. One piece of advice was not to quarrel with his wife Eleanor. Eleanor seems to have been an active, interfering woman, and she was probably very much vexed to see her husband begin so much and perform so little. She used to say that he was more a monk than a king, and they had lived an unhappy life together even before the Crusade. Eleanor went with Louis to Jerusalem, but when they came back she said that she wished to be separated from him. Suger wished the king to do all in his power to prevent this, but Louis gave way, and said he would do whatever might be settled by a council of the clergy which was to meet and consider the question. It was decided that the king and queen should be separated, and Eleanor left the French court and went to Aquitaine, the country which had belonged to her, and which, by her marriage with the French king, had become part of his kingdom, but was now his no longer. She very soon after married Henry, Count of Anjou.
This Henry was the grandson of an English king, Henry I. His mother, Matilda, had wished to be queen of England, and had had a war with her cousin Stephen, which had ended in an agreement that Stephen should be King of England while he lived, and that the next king should be not his own son, but Matilda's son, Henry, who had now married Eleanor of Aquitane. A year or two afterwards Stephen died and Henry became King of England. Eleanor was thus for the second time the wife of a king.
Henry was still vassal of the French king for the duchies and counties which he held in France, Anjou, Aquitaine, and several others, for he constantly went over to France and conquered more provinces from the weak Louis. In later years Louis found a mean way of revenging himself upon Henry by helping Henry's sons to rebel against their father. He invited the eldest to the French court, and encouraged him to resist Henry. It was perhaps some kind of excuse for him that the young prince had married his daughter.
Louis married another wife after Eleanor had left him, and when she died, a third. It was not till he had been married for thirty years that he at last had a son, at whose birth the whole French nation was so much delighted that he was called Dieudonné or, given by God. At the age of fifteen this son Philip was crowned, like so many of the early French kings, in his father's lifetime. A few months later Louis VII. died. He had reigned for forty-three years, and had done very little for his people. An old writer says, "Louis was pious towards God, mild to his subjects, full of respect for the clergy, but more simple than was fitting for a king. He trusted too much to the advice of his nobles, who cared nothing for honesty or justice, and so was guilty of more than one serious fault, in spite of the goodness of his disposition." Under his reign, however, were seen the good results of his father's victories. The barons were more obedient than they had been to former kings, the whole country was growing more orderly, and the people were being freed from the tyranny of the nobles.
Louis made agreements with some of the chief towns that they should not belong to any nobleman or bishop as they had all done before, but that they should govern themselves, make laws for themselves, choose their judges and other officers, and have other powers which they had never before enjoyed. In return, they were to pay the king sums of money from time to time, and to send men to his armies, like his great vassals, when he went to war. Such an arrangement made with a town was called a commune, and many towns wished to have communes given to them. After a time the town itself came to be called a commune, as well as the arrangement making it so. Louis VI. had given a few communes, but Louis VII. gave many more, and this was one of the ways in which the kings and the common people came to be of more importance, and the nobles of less importance, in France, as both the money which the communes now paid to the king, and the powers which the king gave to the communes, had before belonged to the nobles, so that they were left poorer and weaker, less able to resist the king or to oppress the people.
