to be tempted to an enterprise so unprofitable, and a It happened that a Pope, far different from the fiery and implacable Innocent, occupied the Papal throne. Honorius the Third was far more animated against the Saracen foe than against heretical Christianity. He spent his life and reign in urging monarchs to postpone all other objects and enterprises to the delivery of the Holy Sepulchre. Honorius considered the question of Toulouse as altogether secondary; and the offer of the young Count Raymond to submit to all just claims of Rome mitigated the rigour of the Pontiff. His Holiness therefore refused to grant the indulgences of the crusade to those who should war against Toulouse. He refused to excommunicate the young count, or in fact assist Louis the Eighth in his designs. The French king ex CHAP. VI. VI. CHAP. postulated angrily with the Pontiff, and reproached him with breaking the promises which he had held out by his legates. He spurned the recommendation to come to an agreement with the Count of Toulouse on matters of faith, and begged of the Pope to send no more messages to the court of France on the subject of the Albigenses, as he publicly discharged himself, and washed his hands, of the whole affair. Baulked of his designs upon Toulouse, the French king turned his energy and his arms against Henry the Third of England, with whom the truce was on the point of expiration. The moment was opportune. The Earl of Chester was in arms and revolt, and the English king with difficulty made head against his barons. Louis therefore marched unopposed, in the summer of 1224, into Poitou, and laid siege to La Rochelle. It was gallantly defended, and timely succours despatched to it from England might have retained this important landing place for Henry. But the English king had no succour to send. The English themselves cared little for the loss of Poitou, from whence their monarchs brought over their hated continental favourites. The chief noble of the country, the Viscount of Thouars, concluded a truce with the French till the close of the year, when, if not succoured from England, he consented to transfer his allegiance to the crown of France. In good time La Rochelle surrendered. "And the English," says the biographer of Louis the Eighth, "after having been so long hidden in this last corner of Aquitaine, lost it, and were entirely driven out of France. The grandees of Limoges, of Perigord, and of Aquitaine, all except the Gascons dwelling beyond the Garonne, promised fidelity to King Louis, and kept it." Meantime the Papal party in France were not idle. Honorius had gained nothing by the leniency shown to the family of Toulouse, except to indispose the court of France. And Rome began to see that the Emperor Frederic the Second, on whose friendship and support it had so much depended, was likely to prove an inveterate as well as formidable foe. It thus became the policy of Rome to conciliate the French king, rely upon him, and extend his power. A council was in consequence convened at Bourges, in 1225, in which the respective rights of Raymond and De Montfort were pretended to be discussed. Sentence was of course given by the Church against Raymond. He was excommunicated anew, his adherents declared heretics, and the King of France received the mission to lead the new crusade against them, in lieu of Amaury de Montfort, to whom was given the post of constable. In the spring of the following year Louis assembled his crusading army at Bourges, and proceeded by Nevers and Lyons. Matthew Paris states the number of the horse at 50,000, that of the foot as incalculable. The whole country bowed before such a host, until the citizens of Avignon objected to its passing through their city. They offered the passage of the Rhone over a temporary bridge, as well as supplies of all kinds; but entrance into their walls they refused. Louis replied by instantly commencing the siege. He erected his machines, and the town followed his example. The capture of a city so vast and so well fortified was soon found to be no easy task. Although all the other towns of Provence and Languedoc sent in their submission, Raymond still kept the field and cut off supplies. To find fodder for 50,000 horses in such a position was impossible, and the camp of Louis soon became a hospital and a pest house. The Count of St. Pol was slain; the Bishop of Limoges died; and Thibaud, Count of Champagne, a troubadour and a poet, whom one is surprised to find in the ranks of the crusaders against Toulouse, left the siege, in despite of the positive orders of the king. It lasted three months; but if the besiegers suffered severely, the townsfolk were not less straitened. They surrendered "on certain con CHAP. VI. VI. CHAP. ditions," says Puy Laurens. Their fortifications were destroyed, but the lives and apparently the liberties of the city were respected. The surrender was timely, for a few days after it the Duranee swelled its banks, and inundated the spot on which the king had placed his camp. The three months' resistance of Avignon was not without results favourable to the cause of the south. The reduction of Toulouse was not attempted by the king. The monarch himself was suffering from the pestilence which ravaged his camp at Avignon, and on his return northward he was obliged to stop, from weakness, at Montpellier, where he died soon after on All Saints' day, 1226. By his will Louis the Eighth left all the land of Arras (Artois), which he derived from his mother, to his second son Robert; the counties of Anjou and Maine to his third son Charles; Poiton and Auvergne to Alphonso. Not wishing further to dismember the monarchy, the will specified that any future sons should be ordained ecclesiastics. The royal testament made no mention of Languedoc, of which the conquest was as yet incomplete. But notwithstanding the resistance of Avignon and the death of the king, the region was virtually subdued. The authority of the Pope was at last established on the ruins of the freedom, the intellect, and the civilisation of the south. Rome, indeed, had attained the plenitude of power. It gave away kingdoms, and disposed of populations as if they were, not metaphorically but actually, its flocks. But this was done more by indulging the greed and flattering the animosity of certain classes, than by wisely directing their zeal or commanding their adhesion. The pontiffs were laying the foundations of no permanent power, nor were they pursuing any high or intelligible aim. In Italy they roused and armed the civic classes against the emperor. In France they induced the aris VI. tocracy, and at last the sovereign, of the North to sub- CHAP. jugate the chiefly civic population of the South. Whilst thus mainly contributing to the extension and absolutism of the French monarchy, they were undermining that of the German, and perpetuating anarchy in Italy; for although pretending to favour the democratic principle, they strenuously opposed its development and organisation, and brought exile and ruin on almost every eminent man and family of that country. But no portion of Papal policy is so nefarious or revolting as its treatment of the unfortunate Albigenses. The spirit of hate and vengeance which animated Rome throughout this struggle would in vain be sought in the Bible, but may be traced in that great poem, which so powerfully reflects its age, the Inferno of Dante. That so great and so mundane a power should have been misapplied, absorbed, and lost in greed, arrogance, and vulgar passions, might have been expected; but at least some good might at the same time have been hoped, and those of its designs and of its pontiffs, which were noble and disinterested, might have produced some successful and beneficial results. The crusades against the East, where, as in Europe, barbarism was doomed to triumph over and tread out every race that attempted civilisation, were originally noble designs. They failed often through the ignorant and capricious guidance, the interested and vacillating purposes, of Rome. Towards the close of the reign of Philip Augustus an expedition, planned and impelled by a thoroughly zealous Pope, sent thousands of gallant and noble crusaders to perish by an overflow of the Nile, in utter ignorance of the geography or physical condition of the country they invaded. If such a guidance of the united zeal of Europe was merely imbecile, how shall we characterise the guilt of turning the zeal, fanaticism, and courage of the crusaders, with the promise of Heaven's favour and pardon, against the Count of Toulouse, the Emperor of |