TOWER IN RUE NALETTE IN WHICH CALVIN IS SAID TO HAVE LIVED.TOWER IN RUE NALETTE INWHICH CALVIN IS SAID TO HAVE LIVED.
Some forty colleges were in existence by the end of the fourteenth century and had increased to fifty by the end of the fifteenth; in the seventeenth, Evelyn gives their number as sixty-five. In Félibien’s time some had disappeared, for in his map (1725) forty-four colleges only are marked. Nearly the whole of these colleges clustered around the slopes of Mont St. Genevieve, which at length became that Christian Athens that Charlemagne dreamt of. Each college had its own rules. Generally students were required to attend matins (in summer at 3 a.m., winter at 4), mass, vespers and compline. When the curfew of Notre Dame sounded, they retired to their dormitories. Leave to sleepout was granted only in very exceptional cases. Tennis was allowed, cards and dice were forbidden. The college of Montaigue, which housed eighty-two poor scholars in memory of the twelve apostles and seventy disciples, was reformed in the fifteenth century; so severe was the discipline that the college became the terror of the youth of Paris, and fathers were wont to sober their libertine sons by threatening to makecapetes[68]of them. This was Calvin’s college, where he was known as the “accusative,” from his austere piety. To obtain admission to the college of Cluny (1269) the scholar must pass an entrance examination. He then spent two years at logic, three at metaphysics, two in Biblical studies; he held weekly disputations and preached every fortnight in French; he was interrogated every evening by the president on his studies during the day. If students evinced no aptitude for learning they were dismissed; if only moderate progress were made, the secular duties of the college devolved upon them. It was the foundation of these colleges which organised themselves,about 1200, into powerful corporations of masters and scholars (universitates magistrorum et scholiarum) that gave the university its definite character.
When the term “university” first came into use is unknown. It is met with in the statutes (1215) which, among other matters, define the limits of age for teaching. A master in the arts must not lecture under twenty-one; of theology under thirty-five. Every master must undergo an examination as to qualification and moral fitness at the Episcopal Chancellor’s court. Early in the twelfth century the four faculties of Law, Medicine, Arts and Theology were formed and the national groups reduced to four: French, Picards, Normans and English.[69]Each group elected its own officers, and in 1245 at latest theQuatre Nationswere meeting in the church of St. Julien le Pauvre[70]to choose a common head or rector, who soon superseded the chancellor as head of the university. The rectors in process of time exercised almost sovereign authority in the Latin Quarter. They ruled a population of ten thousand masters and students, who were exempt from civic jurisdiction. In 1200 some German students ill-treated an innkeeper who had insulted their servant. The provost of Paris and some armed citizens attacked the students’ houses and blood was shed, whereupon the masters of the schools complained to the king, who was fierce in his anger, and ordered the provost and his accomplices to be cast into prison, their houses demolished and vines uprooted. The provost was given the choice of imprisonment for life or the ordeal by water. Then followed a series of ordinances which abolished secular jurisdiction over the students and made them subject to ecclesiastical courts alone.
HÔTEL OF THE PROVOST OF PARIS.HÔTEL OF THE PROVOST OF PARIS.
In the reign of Philip le Bel a provost of Paris dared to hang a scholar. The rector immediately closed all classes until reparation was made, and on the Feast of the Nativityof the Virgin thecurésof Paris assembled and went in procession, bearing a cross and holy water to the provost’s house, against which each cast a stone, crying, in a loud voice—“Make honourable reparation, thou cursed Satan, tothy mother Holy Church, whose privileges thou hast injured, or suffer the fate of Dathan and Abiram.” The king dismissed his provost, caused ample compensation to be made, and the schools were reopened.
In 1404 some pages belonging to the royal chamberlain brutally spurred their horses through a procession of scholars wending to the church of St. Catherine. They were stoned by the angry scholars, whereupon they drew sword and attacked them, pursuing them even into the church. The rector demanded satisfaction, but the chamberlain, Charles de Savoisy, was a court functionary, and nothing was done. The rector then closed all the schools and the king ordered the Parlement to do instant justice. The sentence was an exemplary one. The chamberlain’s house was to be demolished, an annuity of one hundred livres to be paid for the maintenance of five chaplaincies under the patronage of the university, a thousand livres compensation to be paid to the injured scholars and a like sum to the university. Three of the chamberlain’s men were to do penance in their shirts, torch in hand, before the churches of St. Genevieve, St. Catherine and St. Sévérin, to suffer a whipping at the cross roads, and to be banished for three years. In 1406 permission was given for the house to be rebuilt, but the university resisted the decree and only gave way one hundred and twelve years later, on condition that the terms of the original condemnation and sentence were inscribed on the new house.
The famous Prés aux Clercs (Clerks’ Meadow) was the theatre of many a fight with the powerful abbots of St. Germain des Prés. From earliest times the students had been wont to take the air in the meadow, which lay between the monastery and the river, and soon claimed the privilege as an acquired right. In 1192 the inhabitants of the monastic suburb resented their insolence, and a free fight ensued, in which several scholars were wounded and one was killed. The rector inculpated the abbot, and each appealed to Rome, with what result is unknown. After nearly acentury of strained relations and minor troubles the abbots in 1278 had walls and other buildings erected on the way to the meadow. The scholars met in force and demolished them. The abbot, who was equal to the occasion, rang his bells, called his vassals to arms and sent a force to seize the gates of the city that gave on the suburb, to prevent reinforcements reaching the scholars. His retainers then attacked the rioters, killed several and wounded many. The rector complained to the papal legate and threatened to close the schools if reparation were not made and justice done within fifteen days, whereupon the legate ordered the provost of the monastery to be expelled for five years. The royal council forced the abbot to exile ten of his vassals, to endow two chantries for the repose of the souls of slainclercsand compensate their fathers by fines of two hundred and four hundred livres respectively, and to pay the rector two hundred livres to be distributed among poor scholars.
The rector claimed right of jurisdiction over the parchments exposed for sale in Paris and its neighbourhood, and attended with his sworn experts the great Fair of Landry at St. Denis, instituted in 877. The students accompanied him with much uproar. At this season the Landry gifts were made by the students to the masters, consisting of a lemon larded with pieces of gold or silver in a crystal glass. The ceremony was accompanied by the sound of drums and musical instruments and was followed by a holiday. Innumerable were the complaints on this and other occasions of the rowdyism of the scholars, their practical jokes and dissolute habits.
Many circumstances contributed to make Paris the capital of the intellectual world in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. France has ever been the home of great enthusiasms and has not feared “to follow where airy voices lead.” The conception and enforcement of a Truce of God (Trève de Dieu) whereby all acts of hostility in private or public wars ceased during certain days of the week or on church festivals; the noble ideal of Christianchivalry; the first crusade—all had their origin in France. The crusaders carried the prestige of the French name and diffused the French idiom over Europe. It was a French monk preaching in France who gave voice to the general enthusiasm; a French pope approved his impassioned oration; a French shout “Dieu le veut” became the crusader’s war-cry. The conquest of the Holy Land was organised by the French, its first Christian king was a French knight, its laws were indited in French, and to this day every Christian in the East is a Frank whatever tongue he may speak. In the thirteenth century Brunetto Latini wrote his most famous work, theLivres dou Trésor, in French, because it wasla parleure plus delitable, il plus commune à toutes gens(“the most delightful of languages and the most common to all peoples.”) Martin da Canale composed his story of Venice in French for the same reason, and Marco Polo dictated his travels in French in a Genoese prison. When St. Francis was sending the brothers to establish the order in distant lands, he himself chose France, but was dissuaded by his friend, Cardinal Ugolin. “When inebriated with love and compassion for Christ,” says the writer of theSpeculum, “and overflowing with sweetest melody of the Spirit, ofttimes would he find utterance in the French tongue; the strains of the divine whisperings which his ear had caught he would express in a French song of joyous exultation, and making the gestures of one playing a viol, he would sing in French of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Never in the history of civilisation were men possessed with such passion for the spiritual life or such faith in the reasoning faculty as in the thirteenth century in Paris. The holiest mysteries were analysed and defined; everywhere was a search for new things. Conservative Churchmen became alarmed and complained of disputants and blasphemers exercising their wits at every street corner. The four camel-loads of manuscripts, the works and commentaries of Aristotle, brought by the Jews fromSpain—a monstrous and mutilated version translated from Greek into Arabic and from Arabic into Latin—became the battle-ground of the schools. The Church at first forbade the study of Aristotle, then by the genius of Aquinas, Christianised and absorbed him. His works became a kind of intellectual tennis-ball bandied between the Averroists, who carried their teachings to a logical consequence, and the more orthodox followers of Aquinas. For three years the faculty was torn asunder by the rival factions. Siger of Brabant, whose eternal light Dante saw refulgent amid other doctors of the Church in the heaven of the Sun, was an Averroist; Siger—
“Che leggendo nel vico degli stramiSillogizzò invidiosi veri.”[71]
“Che leggendo nel vico degli stramiSillogizzò invidiosi veri.”[71]
“Che leggendo nel vico degli stramiSillogizzò invidiosi veri.”[71]
The Rue du Fouarre (Straw), where Siger taught and perhaps Dante studied, was the street of the Masters of the Arts. Every house in it was a school. It still exists, though wholly modernised, opposite the foot of the Petit Pont. Its name has been derived from the straw spread on the floor of the schools or on which the students sat, but there is little doubt that Benvenuto da Imola’s[72]explanation, that it was so named from a hay and straw market held there, is the correct one.
Le Petit Pont.Le Petit Pont.
The wonderful thirteenth century saw the meridian glory of the university. It was the age of the great Aristotelian schoolmen who all taught at Paris—Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and Roger Bacon, their candid critic, who carried the intellectual curiosity of the age beyond the tolerance of his Franciscan superiors and twice suffered disciplinary measures at Paris.
In the fourteenth century the university was as renowned as ever. Among many tributes from great scholars we choose that of Richard de Bury, bishop of Durham, who in hisPhilobiblonwrites: “O Holy God of gods in Zion, what a mighty stream of pleasure made glad our hearts whenever we had leisure to visit Paris, the Paradise of the world, and to linger there; where the days seemed ever few for the greatness of our love! There are delightful libraries more aromatic than stores of spicery; there are luxuriant parks of all manners of volumes; there are Academic meads shaken by the tramp of scholars; there are lounges of Athens; walks of the Peripatetics; peaks of Parnassus; and porches of the Stoics. There is seen the surveyor of all arts and sciences Aristotle, to whom belongs all that is most excellent in doctrine, so far as relates to this passing sublunary world; there Ptolemy measures epicycles and eccentric apogees and the nodes of the planets by figures and numbers; there Paul reveals the mysteries; there his neighbour Dionysius arranges and distinguishes the hierarchies; there the virgin Carmentis reproduces in Latin characters all that Cadmus collected in Phœnician letters; there indeed opening our treasures and unfastening our purse-strings we scattered money with joyous heart and purchased inestimable books with mud and sand.”
In 1349 the number of professors (maistres-regents) on the rolls was 502: in 1403 they had increased to 709, to which must be added more than 200 masters of theology and canon law. “The University,” wrote Pope Alexander IV. in a papal bull, “is to the Church what the tree of life was to the earthly Paradise, a fruitful source of all learning, diffusing its wisdom over the whole universe; there the mind is enlightened and ignorance banished and Jesus Christ gives to His spouse an eloquence which confounds all her enemies.”
But already decadence had set in. The multiplication and enrichment of colleges proved fatal to the old democraticvigour and equality. Some colleges pretended to superiority and the movement lost its unity. Scholasticism had done its work and no new movement took its place. Teachers lost all originality and did but ruminate and comment on the works of their great predecessors. Schools declined in numbers and scholars in attendance. Ordinances were needed to correct the abuses covered by the title of scholar. The Jacobin and Cordelier teachers, moreover, had exhausted much life from the university; but its fame continued, and Luther in his early conflicts with the papacy appealed against the pope to the university. But it made the fatal blunder of opposing the Reform and the Renaissance, instead of absorbing them, and the interest of those great movements centres around the college of France.
THEcourt of Philip III., pitiful scion of a noble king, is associated with a dramatic judicial murder at Paris. Among the late-repentant souls temporarily exiled from purification who crowd around Dante at the foot of the Mont of Purgatory is that of Pierre de la Brosse, “severed from its body through hatred and envy and not for any sin committed.” Unhappy Pierre was St. Louis’ chamberlain and had been present at his death. He filled the same high office under his son, became his favourite minister and all-powerful at court. In 1276 the king’s eldest son by his first queen died under suspicion of poison. The second queen, sister of the Duke of Brabant, being envious of Pierre’s ascendency, began insidiously to abuse the king’s ear. Pierre met the queen’s move by clandestinely spreading a report that the prince was sacrificed to secure the succession to her own offspring. The king was then persuaded by the queen’s friends to consult a famous prophetess, who declared her innocent, and Pierre’s death was plotted by the queen, her brother of Brabant, and some discontented and jealous nobles. One morning Paris was startled by the arrest of the omnipotent minister, who was tried before a commission packed by his enemies, and hanged on 30th June 1278, by the common hangman, at the gibbet on Montfaucon, in the presence of the Duke of Brabant and others of his enemies. The popular belief was that he had been accused of an attempt on the queen’s chastity: actually his destructionhad been compassed by a charge of treason, based on some forged letters. The tragic end of Pierre de la Brosse excited universal interest and discussion. Benvenuto da Imola says that Dante, when in Paris, diligently sought out the truth and convinced himself of the great minister’s innocence.
A prince of far different calibre was the Fourth Philip, surnamed the Fair, who grappled with and humiliated the great pontiff, Boniface VIII.—the most resolute upholder of the papacy in her claim to universal secular supremacy—and thus achieved a task which had baffled the mighty emperors themselves; a prince who, in Dante’s grim metaphor, scourged the shameless harlot of Rome from head to foot, and dragged her to do his will in France.
PALAIS DE JUSTICE, CLOCK TOWER AND CONCIERGERIE.PALAIS DE JUSTICE, CLOCK TOWER AND CONCIERGERIE.
Philip’s reign is remarkable for the establishment of the Parlement and the first convocation of the States-General in Paris. From earliest times of the Monarchy, the kings had dispensed justice, surrounded by the chief Churchmen and nobles of the land, thus constituting an ambulatory tribunal, which was held wherever the sovereign might happen to be. In 1302 Philip fixed the tribunal at Paris, restricted it to judicial functions, and housed it in his palace of the Cité, which, in 1431, when the kings ceased to dwell there, became the Palais de Justice. The palace was rebuilt by Philip. A vast hall, divided by a row of columns adorned with statues of the kings of France, and said to have been the most spacious and most beautiful Gothic chamber in France, with other courts and offices, accommodated the Parlement. The tribunal was at first composed of twenty-six councillors or judges, of whom thirteen were lawyers, presided over by the royal chancellor. It sat twice yearly for periods of two months, and consisted of three chambers or courts.[73]The nobles who at first sat among the lay members gradually ceased to attend owing to a sense of their legal inefficiency, and the Parlement became at length a purely legal body. During the imprisonment of the French king, John the Good, in England, theParlement[74]saten permanence, and henceforth became thecour souveraine et capitaleof the kingdom. The purity of its members was maintained by severest penalties. In 1336 one of the presidents was convicted of receiving bribes and hanged. Twelve years later the falsification of some depositions was punished with the same severity, and in 1545 a corrupt chancellor was fined 100,000 livres, degraded, and imprisoned for five years. The chief executive officer of the Parlement, known as the Concierge, appointed the bailiffs of the court and had extensive local jurisdiction over dishonest merchants and craftsmen, whose goods he could burn. His official residence, known as the Conciergerie, subsequently became a prison, and so remains to this day. The entrance flanked by the two ancienttours de César et d’Argent, is one of the most familiar objects in Paris. There the Count of Armagnac was assassinated and the cells are still shown where Marie Antoinette, Madame Roland, Danton, Robespierre, and many of the chief victims of the Terror were lodged before their execution.
The same year (1302) saw the ripening of Philip’s long quarrel with Pope Boniface VIII. and the first meeting of the States-General. The king knew he had embarked on a struggle in which the mightiest potentates had been worsted: he determined to appeal to the patriotism of all classes of his subjects and fortify himself on the broad basis of such popular opinion as then existed. The meeting of the States-General after the burning of the papal bull in Paris on the memorable Sunday of 11th February 1302, made an epoch in French history. For the first time members of theTiers Etat(the Third Estate, or Commons), sat beside the two privileged orders of clergy and nobles, and were recognised as one of the legitimate orders of the realm. The assembly was convoked to meet in Notre Dame on the 10th of April. The question was the old one which had rent Christendomasunder for centuries: Was the pope to be supreme over the princes and peoples of the earth in secular as well as in spiritual matters? The utmost enthusiasm prevailed, and though the prelates spoke with a somewhat timid voice the assembled members swore to risk their lives and property rather than sacrifice the honour of the crown and their own liberties to the insolent usurpation of the pope. Excommunication followed, but the king had ordered all the passes from Italy to be guarded, so that no papal letter or messenger should enter France. “Boniface, who,” says Villani, the Florentine chronicler, “was proud and scornful, and bold to attempt every great deed, magnanimous and puissant, replied by announcing the publication of a bull deposing the king from his throne and releasing his subjects from their allegiance.” Philip, at an assembly in the garden of the palace in the Cité, and in presence of the chief ecclesiastical, religious and lay authorities, again laid his case before the people and read an appeal against the pope to a future Council of the Church.
The bull of deposition was to be promulgated on 8th September. On 7th September, while the aged pope was peacefully resting at his native city of Anagni, Guillaume de Nogaret, bearing the royal banner of France, Sciarra Colonna and other disaffected Italian nobles, with three hundred horsemen, flung themselves into Anagni, crying—“Death to Pope Boniface.” The papal palace was unguarded; at the first alarm the cardinals fled and hid themselves, and all but a few faithful servants forsook their master. The defenceless pope believed that his hour was come, but, writes Villani, “Great-souled and valiant as he was, he said, ‘Since like Jesus Christ I must be taken by treachery and suffer death, at least I will die like a pope.’ He commanded his servants to robe him in the mantle of Peter, to place the crown of Constantine on his head and the keys and crozier in his hands.” He ascended the papal throne and calmly waited. Guillaume, Sciarra and the other leaders burst into the apartment, swordin hand, uttering the foulest of insults; but awed and cowed by the indomitable old pontiff, who stood erect in appalling majesty, their weapons dropped and none durst lay a hand upon him. They set a guard outside the room and proceeded to loot the palace. For three days the grand old pontiff—he was eighty-six years of age—remained a prisoner, until the people of Anagni rallied and rescued him, and he returned to Rome. In a month the humiliated Boniface died of a broken heart, and before two years were passed his successor in Peter’s chair, Pope Clement V., revoked all his bulls and censures, expunged them from the papal register, solemnly condemned his memory and restored the Colonna family to all their honours. Dante, who hated Boniface as cordially as Philip did, and cast him into hell, was yet revolted at the cruelty of the “new Pilate, who had carried the fleur-de-lys into Anagni, who made Christ captive, mocked Him a second time, renewed the gall and vinegar, and slew Him between two living thieves.” But the “new Pilate was not yet sated.” The business at Anagni had only been effectedspendendo molta moneta; the disastrous battle of Courtrai and the inglorious Flemish wars had exhausted the royal treasury; the debasement of the coinage had availed nought, and Philip turned his lustful eyes on a once powerful lay order, whose wealth and pride were the talk of Christendom.
Ile de la Cité.Ile de la Cité.
After the capture of Jerusalem and the establishment there of a Christian kingdom, pilgrims flocked to the holy places. Soon, however, piteous stories reached Jerusalem of the cruel spoliation and murder of unarmed pilgrims on their journey from the coast by hordes of roving lightly-armed Bedouins, against whom the heavily-armed Franks were powerless. The evil was growing well-nigh intolerable when, in 1118, two young French nobles, Hugh of Payens and Godfrey of St. Omer, with other seven youths of highest birth, bound themselves into a lay community, with the object of protecting the pilgrims’ way. They took the usual vow of poverty, charity and obedience; St. Bernard drewup their Rule—and we may be sure it was austere enough—pope and patriarch confirmed it. Their garb was a mantle of purest white linen with a red cross embroidered on the shoulder. The order was housed in a wing of the king’s palace, which was built on the site of Solomon’s Temple, hard by the Holy Sepulchre, and its members called themselves the Poor Soldiers of Christ and of Solomon’s Temple. Their banner, half of black, half of white, was inscribed with the device “non nobis Domine.” Their battle-cry “Beauceant,” and their seal, two figures on horseback, have not been satisfactorily interpreted—the latter probably portrays a knight riding away with a rescued pilgrim. Soon the little band of nine was joined by hundreds of devoted youths from rich and noble families; endowments to provide them with arms and horses and servants flowed in, and thus was formed the most famous, the purest and the most heroic body of warriors the world has ever seen. Hugh de Payens had gathered three hundred Knights-Templars around him at Jerusalem: in five years nearly every one had been slain in battle. But enthusiasm filled the ranks faster than they were mowed down: none ever surrendered and the order paid no money for ransom. When hemmed in by overwhelming numbers, they fought till the last man fell, or died, a wounded captive, in the hands of the Saracens. Of the twenty-two Grand Masters seven were killed in battle, five died of wounds, and one of voluntary starvation in the hands of the infidel.
When Acre was lost, and the last hold of the Christians in the Holy Land was wrested from them, only ten Knights-Templars of the five hundred who fought there escaped to Cyprus. They chose Jacques de Molay for Grand Master, replenished their treasury and renewed their members; but their mission was gone for ever. The order was exempt from episcopal jurisdiction and subject to the pope alone: its wealth, courage and devotion were rusting for lack of employment. Boniface VIII., with that grandeur and daring which make of him despite his faults, so magnificent afigure in history, conceived the idea of uniting them with the other military orders—the Hospitallers and the Teutonic Knights—and making of the united orders an invincible army to enforce on Europe the decrees of a benevolent and theocratic despotism. They soon became suspected and hated by bishops and kings alike, and at length were betrayed by the papacy itself to their enemies.
In 1304, a pair of renegade Templars,[75]who for their crimes were under sentence of imprisonment for life in the prison at Toulouse, sought an introduction to the king, and promised in return for their liberty to give information of certain monstrous crimes and sacrileges of common and notorious occurrence in the order. Depositions were taken and sent to the king’s creature, Pope Clement V. Some communication passed between them, but no action was taken and the matter seemed to have lapsed. About a year after these events the pope wrote an affectionate letter to Jacques de Molay, inviting him to bring the treasure of the order and his chief officers to France, to confer with himself and the king respecting a new crusade. Jacques and his companions, suspecting nothing, came and were received by pope and king with great friendliness: the treasure, twelve mules’ load of gold and silver, was stored in the vaults of the great fortress of the Templars at Paris. Some rumours reached de Molay of the delation made by the Toulousian prisoners, but the pope reassured him in an interview, April 1307, and lulled him into security. On 14th September of the same year all the royal officers of the realm were ordered to hold themselves armed for secret service on 12th October, and sealed letters were handed to them to be opened on that night. At dawn on the 13th, all the Templars in France were arrested in their beds and flung into the episcopal gaols, and the bishops then proceeded to “examine” the prisoners. One hundred and forty were dealt with in Paris, the centre of the order.The charges and a confession of their truth by the Grand Master were read to them: denial, they were told, was useless; liberty would be the reward of confession, imprisonment the penalty of denial.
PALACE OF THE ARCHBISHOP OF SENS.PALACE OF THE ARCHBISHOP OF SENS.
A few confessed and were set free. The remainder were “examined.” Starvation and torture of the most incredible ferocity did their work. Thirty-six died under torture in Paris, and many others in other places: most of the remainder confessed to anything the inquisitors required. The pope, warned by the growing feeling in Europe, now became alarmed, and the next act in the drama opens at Paris, where a papal commission sat at the Abbey of St. Genevieve, to hear what the Templars had to say in their defence. All were invited to give evidence and promised immunity in the name of the pope. Hundreds came to Paris to defend their order,[76]but having been made to understand by the bishops that they would be burned as heretics if they retracted their confessions, they held back for a time until solemnly assured by the papal commissioners that they had nothing to fear, and might freely speak. Ponzardus de Gysiaco, preceptor of Payens, then came forward and disclosed the atrocious means used to extort confessions, and said if he were so tortured again he would confess anything that were demanded of him. He would face death, however horrible, even by boiling and fire, in defence of his order, but long-protracted and agonising torture was beyond human endurance. He was sent back to confinement and the warders were bidden to see that he suffered naught for what he had said. The rugged old master, Jacques de Molay, scarred by honourable wounds, the marks of many a battle with the infidel, was brought before the court and his alleged confession was read to him. He was stupefied, and swore that if his enemies were not priests he would know how to deal with them. A secondtime he was examined and preposterous charges of unnatural crimes were preferred against the order by the king’s chancellor, Guillaume de Nogaret. They were drawn from a chronicle at St. Denis, and based on certain statements alleged to have been made by Saladin, Sultan of Babylon (Egypt). Again he was stupefied, and declared he had never heard of such things. And now the Templars’ courage rose. Two hundred and thirty-one came forward, emaciated, racked and torn; among them one poor wretch was carried in, whose feet had been burnt off by slow fires. Nearly all protested that the confessions had been wrung from them by torture, that their accusers were perjurers, and that they would maintain the purity of their orderusque ad mortem(“even unto death”). Many complained that they were poor, illiterate soldiers, neither able to pay for legal defence nor to comprehend the charges indicted in Latin against them. When the commissioners went to interrogate twenty Templars detained in the abbey of St. Genevieve, a written petition was handed to them by the prisoners, with a prayer to the papal notaries to correct the bad Latin. It was Philip’s turn now to be alarmed, but the prelates were equal to the crisis. The archbishop of Sens, metropolitan of Paris and brother of the king’s chief adviser, convoked a provincial court at his palace in Paris, and condemned to the stake fifty-four of the Knights who had retracted their confessions. On the 10th of May the papal commissioners were appealed to: they expressed their sorrow that the episcopal court was beyond their jurisdiction, but would consider what might be done. Short time was allowed them. The stout-hearted archbishop was not a man to show weakness; he went steadily on with his work, and in spite of appeals from the papal judges for delay, the fifty-four were led forth on the afternoon of the 12th[77]to the open countryoutside the Porte St. Antoine, near the convent of St. Antoine des Champs, and slowly roasted to death. They bore their fate with the constancy of martyrs, each protesting his innocence with his last breath, and declaring that the charges alleged against the order were false. Two days later, six more were sent to the stake at the Place de Grève. In spite of threats, the prelates went on with their grim work of terror. Many of the bravest Templars still gave the lie to their traducers, but the majority were cowed: further confessions were obtained, and the pope was satisfied. The proudest, bravest and richest order in Christendom was crushed or scattered to the four corners of the world. Their vast estates were nominally confiscated to the Knights Hospitallers; but our “most dear brother in Christ, Philip the king, although he was not moved by avarice nor intended the appropriation of the Templars’ goods”[78]had to be compensated for the expense of the prosecution. The treasure of the order failed to satisfy the exorbitant claims of the crown, and the Hospitallers were said to have been impoverished rather than enriched by the transfer.
The last act was yet to come. On 11th March 1314, a great stage was erected in theparvisof Notre Dame, and there, in chairs of state, sat the pope’s envoy, a cardinal, the archbishop of Sens, and other officers of Christ’s Church on earth. The Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, and three preceptors were exposed to the people, their alleged confession and the papal bull suppressing the order, and condemning them to imprisonment for life, were read by the cardinal. But, to the amazement of his Eminence, when the clauses specifying the enormities to which the accused had confessed were being recited, the veteran Master and the preceptor of Normandy rose, and in loud voices, heard of all the people, repudiated the confession, and declared that they were wholly guiltless, and ready to suffer death. They had not long to wait. Hurried counsel was held withthe king, and that same night Jacques de Molay and the preceptor of Normandy were brought to a little island on the Seine, known as the Isle of the Trellises,[79]and burnt to death, protesting their innocence to the last.
“God pays debts, but not in money.” An Italian chronicler relates that the Master, while expiring in the flames, solemnly cited pope and king to meet him before the judgment-seat of God. In less than forty days Clement V. lay dead: in eight months Philip IV. was thrown by his horse and went to his account. Seven centuries later the grisly fortress of the Templars opened its portals, and the last of the unbroken line of the kings of France, Louis XVI., was led forth to a bloody death.
Those who would read the details of the dramatic examination at Paris before the papal commissioners, may do so in the minutes published by Michelet.[80]The great historian declares that a study of the evidence shook his belief in the Templars’ innocence, and that if he were writing his history again, he must needs alter his attitude towards them. Such is not the impression left on the mind of the present writer. Moreover it has been pointed out that there is a suspicious identity in the various groups of testimonies, corresponding to the episcopal courts whence such testimonies came. The royal officers, after the severest search, could find not a single compromising document in the Templars’ houses: nothing but a few account books, works of devotion and copies of St. Bernard’s Rule. There were undoubtedly unworthy and vicious knights among the fifteen thousand Templars belonging to the order, but the charges brought against them are too monstrous for belief.The call which they had responded to so nobly, however, had long ceased. They were wealthy, proud and self-absorbed. Sooner or later they must infallibly have gone the way of all organisations which have outlived their use and purpose. It is the infamy of their violent destruction for which pope and king must answer at the bar of history.
The Seine at Alfortville.The Seine at Alfortville.
WITHthe three sons of Philip who successively became kings of France, the direct line of the Capetian dynasty ends: with the accession of Philip VI. in 1328, the house of Valois opens the sad century of the English wars—a period of humiliation and defeat, of rebellious and treacherous princes, civil strife, famine and plague, illumined only by the heroism of a peasant-girl, who, when king and nobles were sunk in shameless apathy or sullen despair, saved France from utter extinction. Pope after pope sought to make peace, but in vain:Hui sont en paix, demain en guerre(“to-day peace, to-morrow war”) was the normal and inevitable situation until the English had wholly subjected France or the French driven the English to their natural boundary of the Channel.
Never since the days of Charlemagne had the French Monarchy been so powerful as when the Valois came to the throne: in less than a generation Crecy and Poitiers had made the English name a terror in France, and a French king, John the Good, was led captive to England. Once again, as in the dark Norman times, Paris rose and determined to save herself. Etienne Marcel, provost of the merchants, whose statue now stands near the site of the Maison aux Piliers, the old Hostel de Ville which he bought for the citizens of Paris, became the leader of the movement. The Dauphin,[81]who had assumed the title of Lieutenant-General, convoked the States-General at Paris,but he was forced by Marcel and his party to grant some urgent reforms, and a Committee of National Defence was organised by the provost, who became virtually dictator of Paris. The Dauphin fled to Compiègne to rally the nobles. During the ensuing anarchy the poor, dumb, starving serfs of France, in their hopeless misery and despair, rose in insurrection and swept like a flame over the land. Froissart, who writes from the distorted stories told him by the seigneurs, has woefully exaggerated the atrocities of theJacquerie.[82]There was much arson and pillage, but barely thirty of the nobles are known to have perished. Of the merciless vengeance taken by the seigneurs there is ample confirmation. The wretched peasants were easily out-manœuvred and killed like rats by the mail-clad nobles and their men-at-arms; so many were butchered in the market-place of Meaux that weariness stayed the arms of the slaughterers, and fire completed their work. Twenty thousand are estimated to have perished between the Seine and the Marne. Meanwhile the Dauphin was marching on Paris: Marcel had seized the Louvre, repaired and extended the wall of Paris, and raised an army. The provost turned for support to theJacques, and on their suppression essayed to win over King Charles of Navarre, whose aid would decide the issue. Plot and counterplot followed. On 31st July 1358, Marcel was inspecting the gates of Paris, and at the Bastille[83]St. Denis ordered the keys to be given up to the treasurer of the king of Navarre, who was with him. The guards refused, and Jean Maillart, Marcel’s sheriff and bosom friend, leapt on his horse, rode to the Halles, and crying;—“Au roi, au roi, mont-joie St. Denis,” called the king’s friends to arms, and hastened to intercept the provost at the Bastille St. Antoine. Marcel was holding the keys in his hand when they arrived. “Stephen,Stephen!” cried Maillart, “what dost thou here at this hour?” “I am here,” answered the provost, “to guard the city whose governor I am.” “Par Dieu,” retorted Maillart, “thou art here for no good,” and turning to his followers, said, “Behold the keys which he holds to the destruction of the city.” Each gave the other the lie. “Good people,” protested Marcel, “why would you do me ill? All I wrought was for your good as well as mine.” Maillart for answer smote at him, crying, “Traitor,à mort, à mort!” There was a stubborn fight, and Maillart felled the provost by a blow with his axe; six of the provost’s companions were slain, and the remainder haled to prison. Next day the Dauphin entered Paris in triumph, and the popular leaders were executed on the Place de Grève. The provost’s body was dragged to the court of the church of St. Catherine du Val des Ecoliers, where it lay naked that it might be seen of all: after a long exposure it was cast into the Seine. All the reforms were revoked by the king, but the remembrance of the time when the merchants and people of Paris had dared to speak to their royal lord face to face of justice and good government, was never obliterated.
Meanwhile the land was a prey to anarchy. Law there was none. Bands ofroutiers, or organised brigands, English and French, ravaged and pillaged without let or hindrance. Eustache d’Aubrecicourt, with 10,000 men-at-arms, raided Champagne at his will and held a dozen fortresses. The peasants posted sentinels in the church towers while they worked in the fields, and took refuge by night in boats moored in the rivers.
The English invasion of 1359 resembled a huge picnic or hunting expedition. The king of England and his barons brought their hunters, falcons, dogs and fishing tackle. They marched leisurely to Bourg-la-Reine, less than two leagues from Paris, pillaged the surrounding country and turned to Chartres, where tempest and sickness forced Edward III. to come to terms. After the treaty of Bretigny, in 1360, the Parisians saw their good King John again, whowas ransomed for a sum equal to about ten million pounds of present-day value. The memory of this and other enormous ransoms exacted by the English endured for centuries, and when a Frenchman had paid his creditors he would say,—j’ai payé mes Anglais.[84](“I have paid my English.”) A magnificent reception was accorded to the four English barons who came to sign the Peace at Paris. They were taken to the Sainte-Chapelle and shown the fairest relics and richest jewels in the world, and each was given a spine from the crown of thorns, which he deemed the noblest jewel that could be presented to him.
In 1364, after sowing dragons’ teeth in France by bestowing in appanage the duchy of Burgundy on his youngest son Philip the Bold, King John the Good returned to captivity and death at London in chivalrous atonement for the breaking of parole by his second son, Louis of Anjou, who had been interned at Calais as a hostage under the treaty of 1360. The Dauphin, now Charles V., by careful statesmanship succeeded in restoring order to the kingdom and to its finances[85]and in winning some successes against the English. The dread companies ofroutiers, after defeating and slaying Jacques de Bourbon and capturing one hundred French chevaliers, were bribed by Pope Innocent VI. to pass into Lombardy, or induced to follow du Guesclin, the national hero of the wars against the English, in a crusade against Pedro the Cruel in Spain.
In 1370 the English camp fires were again seen outside Paris: Charles refused battle and allowed them to ravage the suburbs with impunity. Before the army left, an English knight swore he would joust at the gates of the city, and spurred lance in hand against them. As he turned to ride back, a big butcher lifted his pole-axe, smote the knight on the neck and felled him; four others battered him todeath, “their blows,” says Froissart, “falling on his armour like strokes on an anvil.”
By wise counsel rather than by war Charles won back much of his dismembered country. He was a great builder and patron of the arts. He employed Raymond of the Temple, his “beloved mason,” to transform the Louvre into a sumptuous palace with apartments for himself and his queen, the princes of the blood and the officers of the royal household. Each suite of apartments was furnished with a private chapel, those of the king and queen being carved with much “art and patience.” A gallery was built for the minstrels and players of instruments. A great garden was planted towards the Rue St. Honoré on the north, and the old wall of Philip Augustus on the east, in which were an “Hôtel des Lions,” or collection of wild beasts, and a tennis court, where the king and princes played. The palace accounts still exist, with details of payments for “wine for the stone-cutters which the king our lord gave them when he came to view the works.” Jean Callow and Geoffrey le Febre were paid for planting squares of strawberries, hyssop, sage, lavender, balsam, violets, and for making paths, weeding and carrying away stones and filth; others were paid for planting bulbs of lilies, double red roses and other good herbs. The first royal library was founded by Charles, and Peter the Cage-maker was employed to protect the library windows from birds and other beasts by trellises of wire. An interesting payment of six francs in gold, made to Jacqueline, widow of a mason “because she is poor and helpless and her husband met his death in working for the king at the Louvre,” demonstrates that royal custom had anticipated modern legislation.