EUROPE'S NEW MONARCHIES

At first glance, Louis IX of France and Henry III of England would seem to have been remarkably similar. They were closely related by blood, both being descendants of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Both commanded territories in France for the better part of the thirteenth century, and thus their fates were inextricably entwined. Each acceded to his throne when he was a boy, and each had redoubtable regents during his minority: Chief among Henry's was William Marshall, earl of Pembroke, the most famous knight in Christendom; Louis's regent was his mother, the masterful Blanche of Castile. The kings—and their brothers—married sisters, daughters of Raymond of Provence. Both were pious men who sponsored the construction of soaring churches that were the flower of the Gothic style—Westminster Abbey in London, the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. Both men had to deal with an unruly feudal nobility and with a powerful clergy. Both presided over the beginnings of true nationhood for their countries.

But the differences between the monarchs' fates—and those of their kingdoms— were profound. Henry Plantagenet died bereft of authority, reviled by the chroniclers. Louis Capet died in the fullness of his power, so revered that he was canonized shortly thereafter. Henry left territories that were a great deal smaller than they had been in his grandfather's day and a monarchy that was held in check by England's baronage: The parliamentary system had been born. The French royal domain, by contrast, grew from a relatively small area surrounded by often hostile feudal dependencies into an enormous state, united under monarchs whose absolute authority only increased as the century came to a close.

Some of the reasons for the differences may be found in the natures of the two countries: France was large and diffuse, a condition that worked to a strong king's advantage. England was compact and much more homogeneous. to their diversity, the French never established a tradition of communal resistance to the king; thanks to their similarity, the English did. As important as these factors, however, were the characters of the kings who reigned during the age of change. The successes and failures of Henry and Louis depended in large part on their own personalities—and on those of their fathers and grandfathers.

In this detail from an illuminated Bible commissioned by King Louis VIII of France, a king is depicted holding the orb and scepter that symbolized his office. Reigning for only three years before his death in 1226, Louis was one of five monarchs to ascend the French throne in the course of the thirteenth century—a period that saw a consolidation of royal authority not only in France but in the realm of its old rival, England.

Few in France could have foreseen the developments of the thirteenth century as the twelfth drew to its close. When Philip II, Louis's grandfather, came to the throne as a fourteen-year-old in the year 1180, the French monarchy was weak. Europe was a continent still in the process of settling down after centuries of disorganization and terror. When the migrations and invasions that had shattered the structures of the ancient world at last slowed to a stop, in about AD 1000, they left behind a fragmented continent in which a contractual, or feudal, relationship of mutual support

Hetwc'en local warlords and their dependent vassals was the best guarantee of security. The relationship of the king to his lords had the same character; support and (Kotection in return for allegiance and service.

But the degree of allegiance could vary widely. When Philip became king, he acquired two quite separate levels of authority over different parts of his realm. In territories forming the royal domain—those lands that answered directly to him as their lord—royal power was indeed a reality, but the territory concerned was small. Centered on the Ile-de-France and the city of Paris, the royal domain covered less than 10,000 square miles—about the size of the modern-day state of Vermont.

Beyond the borders of the royal domain, the king reigned in little more than name. In theory, he was the feudal overlord of all the various counties, duchies, and other territories that made up the land of France. In practice, however, the great lords who controlled these regions ruled as virtually independent monarchs and resisted the encroachment of royal power. They acknowledged a formal allegiance to the king as their overlord but did all they could to maintain their independence.

One such vassal lord was particularly well placed to challenge the French king, and that was the king of England, who had substantial landholdings on the French mainland. Since the Norman conquest of 1066, the English throne had had close links with the duchy of Normandy. The French connection had become much stronger after 1154, when the throne passed to Henry II, the son of the count of Anjou, one

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Al Iho dawn of ihc ihiricenlh century, France was a tangled w eb of duchies and counties ruled by local magnates recognising a largely theoretical bond to their feudal overlord, the king. Only in the royal domain— the landlocked ile-de-France around Paris—did the ruler exert unchallenged authority. With Normandy, Anjou, and Aquitaine under his control, the greatest of his vassals was none other than the king of England, whose territory on both sides of the Channel formed the powerful Angevin empire. By the end of the century, however, the situation was very different. Under a scries of strong kings, France had wrested from the Angevins virtually all of their continental possessions except Gascony, leaving an English realm that was considerably shorn of power, although it now included Wales.

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Of France's magnates. With him had come a disparate empire that besides Anjou incorporated Maine, which included Mayenne, Sarthe, part of Orne and Eure-et-Loir; the Touraine; Aquitaine, including Gascony and Poitou; and from the 1160s, Brittany. In effect, it constituted the entire western seaboard of France, with its hinterland stretching as far as the Massif Central. Together with England, Normandy, and parts of Ireland, these lands made up the so-called Angevin empire.

The Angevin territories in France, held for the most part in vassalage to the French king, were actually far more extensive than Philip's own domain. Henry's heir, Richard the Lion-Hearted, had underlined the fact by building a showpiece fortress. Chateau Caillard, on the Seine at Les Andelys, a mere day's march from Paris. Employing the most advanced military architecture of its day, the castle was a direct challenge to Philip's authority; "I could hold Chateau Caillard," boasted Richard, "if it was made of butter."

Philip could scarcely break the Angevin stranglehold while the warrior Richard held the throne. His chance came in 1199, when Richard died and was succeeded by his brother John. The new king's ill-understood character, more complex than that of the ruthlessly effective Richard, led him into diplomatic blunders from which Philip adroitly profited. John soon alienated the lord of Poitou by snatching the lord's betrothed bride for his own wife. The offended noble appealed to Philip, his suzerain, for satisfaction, and in 1202, Philip arraigned John as his vassal to answer the charges against him. John refused, giving Philip the excuse he needed to appropriate his lands and initiate the process of uniting France under a French king.

Philip began by invading Normandy. Chateau Caillard fell after a seven-month siege in 1204, and with his strongest defensive position gone, John could no longer control his fiefs. Philip's triumph, aided by well-placed concessions to the English king's former vassals, was soon complete. By 1205, all of John's territories north of the Loire River had fallen, and the richest and most advanced parts of the Angevin empire were in Philip's hands.

John's overriding purpose was now to regain his lost lands in France, and it was this determination that led him into a disastrous campaign. Joining with other of Philip's enemies, he set out to conquer the French king.

The decisive battle took place on Sunday, July 27, 1214, near the tiny Flemish village of Bouvines, where the boundaries of France, Germany, and Flanders converged. The harvest had already begun on the broad, sloping fields of the monastery of Cysoing, a small foundation dating from the ninth century, but no one was at work among the sheaves. Glinting across the empty grainfields, two armies confronted each other, committed to battle after days of maneuvering.

With the sun burning their backs stood the feudal host of France—some 1,300 knights, with the same number of mounted sergeants and several thousand foot soldiers, all under the command of the experienced King Philip. The oriflamme, or sacred banner of France, had been hurriedly brought from its usual home in the abbey of Saint Denis near Paris to the king's side in the center of the front rank.

Opposite the French ranks were arrayed France's enemies. At their center stood the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto, with the glittering standard of his authority; an eagle perched on a dragon, raised on top of a lofty pole. On the right wing, the earl of Salisbury—illegitimate brother and right-hand man of King John—commanded a select body of English troops as well as a horde of Flemish mercenaries paid for with English silver. At Salisbury's side was the energetic count of Boulogne, Renaud de

A KEY FORTRESS FALLS

N February 1204, after a seven-month siege, the army of France's Philip II dealt a crushing blow to the Angevin empire by breaching the walls of Chateau Caillard, about fifty miles northwest of Paris.

The castle—built at great expense in the 1190s by King Richard of England—was the main stronghold in a chain of forts guarding the duchy of Normandy, then ruled by England. Modeled on Crusader castles Richard had seen in the Holy Land, it had the most up-to-date military architecture of the time, with two wards, or courtyards, a citadel, and a keep, all boasting walls up to thirteen feet thick. Perched on a rocky spur more than 300 feet al>ove the Seine and flanked by cliffs, it seemed impregnable.

But in 1199, the English throne passed to

Richard's inept brother, John, leading Philip to invade Normandy. In August 1203, Philip laid siege to the castle, ordering a boat barricade across the Seine to deny the garrison river-borne relief. While French crossbowmen fired deadly salvos at the garrison, sappers mined beneath the walls, weakening their foundations by setting fires in the tunnels. In February 1204, the outermost tower was brought crashing down, and Philip's troops poured into the outer ward, as shown here. A latrine window gave access to the second ward, and using catapults and mines, the invaders took the citadel. On March 6, the remaining 186 defenders surrendered. Chateau Gaillard's fall sealed the fate of the duchy: Four months later, it was in Philip's control.

Dammartin. Count Ferrand of Flanders took the left wing with many Flemish knights of battle-proven courage and skill.

John himself was not present but was more than 300 miles away to the southwest, in Poitou. He had planned to trap the French king with a pincer's movement between his own force and that of his allies. Philip's son Louis, however, had pinned him down, and his army had made little headway.

On the sweltering battlefield the commanders stood ready, each surrounded by a bodyguard of specially chosen knights of skill and rank. But even before the trumpets sounded for the onset of battle, fighting began. King Philip's most active and resourceful adviser, the bishop of Senlis, sent a force of mounted sergeants to harry Ferrand's Flemish knights in preparation for a French cavalry charge. The Flemings, indignant at confronting common soldiers instead of their knightly equals, refused to ride out to meet them. Instead they waited for Philip's forces to charge before driving them back contemptuously.

A vast dust cloud, stirred up by the charging horses, soon obscured the fighting that ensued, so that it was impossible for an observer to gain a general impression of the fray. Under the masking dust, individual knights picked out worthy opponents to challenge in combat; foot soldiers dashed in where they could to strike at a knight's horse or pin down a fallen warrior until a knight came to take his submission. From time to time, tired by bouts of fierce combat, the knights retreated to regain their breath before rejoining the ranks. Well protected by their armor and by the battlefield convention that captured opponents of noble stock be taken alive for ransom, they could afford a sporting attitude toward warfare, secure in the knowledge that barring accidents, they would live to fight again. Typically, most of the casualties of Bouvines were foot soldiers; even the mounted sergeants sent to harass the Flemish ranks suffered only two fatalities when their attack was so brusquely repulsed.

The tide of battle swept back and forth. At one point, John's allies came close to victory, when Otto's German knights made a determined push to reach the French king. Philip's bodyguard held them off, but as they fought, German foot soldiers slipped through unnoticed to surround Philip and cut his horse from under him. The royal standard-bearer swung the oriflamme wildly to summon assistance, and Philip's assailants were put to flight.

Taking a fresh mount, the king urged his men to attack the German emperor. Otto was less fortunate than Philip. Wounded in the fighting, his horse bolted; his retainers followed their master, leaving the imperial standard behind them. Leaderless, the German knights continued to fight bravely until sundown, but the emperor's departure was a heavy blow to their cause.

On the allies' left wing, the twenty-eight-year-old count of Flanders was also wounded and was subsequently captured by the French. On the right, the count of Boulogne fought on, gathering his knights within a protective circle of closely packed and heavily armed foot soldiers, tough and battle-hardened mercenaries from the Netherlands; the circle opened to allow sorties against the enemy and to receive knights returning to safety when sorely pressed. But by now the odds were telling against the allies. As evening drew on, their ranks became thinner, until eventually the brave count was left with only half a dozen men to continue the unequal struggle. The end came when a French foot soldier managed to lift the section of mail that protected the count's horse and drive his sword up into its belly. The beast fell, trapping its master under it. After an unseemly squabble among several French

Knights as to who should take him prisoner, the count was able to yield to the bishop of Senlis himself and was led off to join Count Ferrand in captivity. The earl of Salisbury was also taken, and by nightfall the alliance was vanquished.

Back in the French camp, the prisoners taken in the battle were brought before the king. They included five counts and twenty-five lords of sufficient rank to fight under their own banners. Magnanimous in victory, the king granted them their lives and dispersed them in bonds to strongholds throughout the country to await ransom.

Confronted with the collapse of all his plans. King John had no choice but to conclude a truce with his victorious enemy and return to England. His defeat was the death knell of his hopes. Although no additional land was lost, the English monarch's territories on the French mainland were now decisively restricted to the lands south of the Loire River—territories where an unruly local nobility made overlordship a comparatively profitless business.

Philip, by contrast, won for himself a security on which he could build. In Paris, a storm of rejoicing for the victory broke out; it was not stilled for a week. Reorganization of the administration followed, and Paris was established as the Capetian capital. The name Bouvines became the cornerstone of a royal propaganda edifice. The great day was celebrated again and again in literary works, of which the Phil-lipide, written by William the Breton, Philip's chaplain and an onlooker at the battle, was the earliest. It was William who gave his master the sobriquet Augustus, or "the Majestic," and it was as Philip Augustus that this effective ruler was to be remembered by his people.

The chronicle was completed in Latin by 1224, a year after Philip's death. The monarch was succeeded by his son Louis VIII, whose brief reign almost seamlessly continued his own. Louis had been actively associated for many years with the policies of his father. It was Louis's successful southern campaign that had pinned John's forces down in 1214; he had followed King John's retreat to England by crossing the Channel at the invitation of a faction of rebellious English barons. The invasion of England was short-lived, however, and Louis devoted his three years' rule to problems in France.

In 1224, at the end of the ten-year truce following the Battle of Bouvines, Louis overran Poitou and started the process of binding that traditionally anti-Capetian region to the throne by grants of money and privileges to nobles, churches, and towns. Next he turned to the project of extending Capetian dominance into the south of France—a region more foreign to the northern French than even England in climate, culture, and mental outlook.

The pretext for annexation of the south was a war against heresy. In the Languedoc, the doctrine of Catharism—a dualistic religion—was a serious threat to the Catholic church. Its doctrine, that God ruled only the spiritual realm of heaven while Satan held power in the physical world on earth, was obviously incompatible with orthodox beliefs. The pope, after failing to limit the spread of Catharism by political and diplomatic pressure, had offered to endorse whoever would take up arms against its adherents, and northern French barons had been fighting in Languedoc since 1208. By the time Louis joined them after returning from his abortive invasion of England, much progress had been made in destroying the ruling families of the south and transferring their lands to their northern attackers, but the French monarchy had not yet gained a real foothold. In 1226, Louis mounted a massive expedition to the Languedoc. Battered by nearly twenty years of savagery and war, the south collapsed.

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AN ARCHITECT'S ALBUM

Llonnecourl’s mechanical drawings ranged from designs for a waler-powered saw and a perfectly accurate crossbow (top) to a lectern-mounted eagle that would face the deacon whenever he read the Gospels (bottom, left).

Ompiled between 1220 and 1235, the sketchbook of the French architect Villard de Honnecourt provides a fascinating insight into the mind of a medieval artist. Combining the roles of designer, sculptor, and engineer, a master mason such as Honnecourt directed and often personally participated in every stage in the erection of a building, from drafting plans, laying foundations, making scaffolding, and building machines for transporting stone to decorating the finished design. Grouped in lodges—exclusive professional bodies with secret archives of formulas and methods— such artisans enjoyed high social status.

Like many of his colleagues, Honnecourt was constantly on the move, executing commissions as far afield as Switzerland and Hungary, searching for new materials, examining new designs, and consulting with fellow architects. In an age when copyright was nonexistent, designs were often imitated in distant lands. Honne-court's sketchbook—intended as an exemplar for his apprentices or possibly for his lodge—contained a rich fund of knowledge on proportion, measurement, ground plans, elevations, and architectural learning gleaned from Byzantine and Arab as well as European sources, in addition to his own pictorial musings on the nature of mechanics and anatomy.

Lxpressive of complete exhaustion, a figure of Christ lies prostrate. Honnecourt's notebook had many such drawings, intended as models for sculptural decoration.

N sketch of Laon Cathedral's towers accurately depicts two statues of oxen, perhaps a reminder of the beasts used in the cathedral's construction. But the huge hand at right is Honnecourt's whimsy.

Ilevolving around a central axis, four masons chisel one another's feet in Honnecourt's design for a bell-striking mechanism.

Louis died that year while his army was still in the field, but the independence of the Languedoc—although the province remained restive and unruly—was already a thing of the past.

Louis IX now succeeded to a royal domain that thanks to his father and grandfather extended from the English Channel to the Mediterranean. The glories of his reign could hardly have been predicted at the time, for Louis was a child of twelve when his father died, and the barons and princes who had seen their position compromised by the growing power of the throne recognized an opportunity to regain some of the ground they had lost. So did King John's son, the young Henry III of England, who responded to overtures from the French rebel barons by unsuccessfully attempting to fight his way back into Poitou. But Louis's mother, Blanche of Castile—herself a granddaughter of Henry II of England—emerged as a resolute and able stateswoman; the barons could not agree among themselves long enough to make any lasting gains, and Blanche's prompt and authoritative actions steered the monarchy safely through Louis's minority. So fierce and resolute was Blanche that street songs described her as a she-wolf. And even after Louis came of age and married Margaret of Provence, Blanche remained his most valued adviser until her death in 1252.

Blanche's piety was the formative influence in Louis's upbringing. He impressed his contemporaries with his good humor and wit but above all with his devoutness and his generosity in almsgiving. Although he had strong convictions as to the overriding prerogatives and duties of royalty and lived amid much magnificence, his personal style was austere and simple. It was said that his clothes, once he had finished wearing them, were not worth handing on to anyone else.

An impressively moral, responsible, and religious monarch, Louis made an early start on a series of magnificent endowments and building projects, which enhanced the splendor of the monarchy along with the glory of God. Perhaps the most notable was the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, designed to house one of Christendom's most sacred relics, the crown of thorns supposedly worn by Jesus.

Louis also embarked on an extensive program to unite France under royal administration. Relations with Henry of England were made more stable, and the disruptive lords who had caused so much trouble in his minority were soon brought under control. In 1247, as an aid to public justice, he sent commissioners, more often than not friars, around his territories to receive and deal with complaints against the bailiffs and provosts who processed provincial administration.

Louis showed a concern for just dealing that few of his contemporaries could demonstrate. His friend and chronicler, Jean de Joinville, described his way of giving audience: "In summer, after hearing mass the king went often to the wood of Vincennes, where he would sit with his back against an oak. . . . Those who had any suit to present could come to speak to him without hindrance from any man." Probity was to emerge as Louis's dominant characteristic.

Unlike many other kings of the period, Louis answered the papal call to liberate the Holy Land. When Blanche heard that her son had taken the cross, she mourned (in the words of Joinville) "as if she had seen him lying dead." He did return alive— although she did not live to see him—but only after suffering disastrous reverses that left an ineradicable mark.

Louis's Crusade, the best-prepared and most-expensive expedition ever mounted to the Middle East, set out in August 1248. His forces landed in Egypt, where they soon captured the delta port of Damietta, but from then on, the expedition found itself

Medieval bestiaries—manuscripts describing animals and their behavior—combined text and pictures to produce so-called pocket zoos that often drew parallels between animal conduct and the correct moral deportment of mankind. Based on an early Greek prototype, the Physiologus, such books relied more upon popular mythology than accurate observation, describing real animals alongside such creatures as the unicorn and the phoenix. Hedgehogs (below) were presented as models of parenthood, feeding their hungry infants with grapes shaken from vines and then impaled on their prickles. Barnacle geese (right) had no apparent moral significance, but according to the tenets of Aristotle, they ripened in an underwater nursery, sprouting like fruit from the arms of the barnacle.

In trouble. Disabled by scurvy and an epidemic of dysentery, much of the army, including the ailing king himself, was captured by the Muslim forces while attempting to retreat from an ill-judged advance inland. Louis's queen, Margaret, left at Damietta in an advanced state of pregnancy, saved the venture from complete disaster by promising large sums of money to the captains of the Italian ships that had brought them, thereby preventing their desertion. A vast ransom secured Louis's freedom, but he had lost many of his men. He spent the next four years fruitlessly engaged in Middle Eastern warfare and diplomacy before finally returning home in 1254, having received news of his mother's death the year before.

Louis had been away for six years all together. He could not forgive himself for his failure to free the holy places and for the loss of Christian lives that the attempt had incurred. For the remainder of his reign, he devoted himself to living out the role of a Christian king, practicing and preaching the ideals of justice and charity and living an increasingly ascetic life.

The king's concern with just government was everywhere apparent. A reforming edict issued in 1254 not only bound the administrators of the royal lands by oath to behave honestly but more practically instituted a machinery of appeal should they fail to do so. At the same time, the hearings of his peripatetic commissioners, or enque-teurs, were put on a regular annual schedule. The 1254 ordinance was proclaimed throughout the realm of France, the first to be so. Louis intended to rule as king of the whole nation. The barons were less than happy, particularly when Louis insisted on

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Making them, too, subject to royal justice. He made persistent efforts to eradicate the practice of judicial duels, by which disputes between nobles were settled by force of arms; in their stead, he encouraged disputants to submit their cases to the Crown.

By now the royal court was the undisputed seat of authority in France. With his officers, Louis devised a variety of means of tapping the riches of the growing towns, whose wealthy professional guilds increasingly stood outside the rigid structures of feudal society. To the traditional royal sources of income—proceeds from the royal domain, now greatly extended, and feudal services in money form—were added subventions cajoled out of the towns, special levies, and the proceeds from judicial processes, including fines and the revenues of confiscated properties. In addition, the Church v/as subjected to heavy taxation. King Louis's piety was no bar to the exercise of his prerogatives.

Louis's foreign affairs, however, were less successful. Relations with the English king, who had launched two failed expeditions to Poitou in 1230 and 1242, continued to strike a sour note. Not until the Treaty of Paris, made in 1259 between Louis and John's successor, Henry III, was the reality of French domination given formal accord. But even then, the terms pleased neither king's supporters, and the discord between the two sovereign powers continued. Six years later, Louis involved France in the troubled affairs of the Italian peninsula, when he allowed his ambitious brother, Charles of Anjou, to accept a papal offer of the crown of Sicily, contested between supporters of the papacy and the German imperial house of Hohenstaufen.

Louis was by then growing old. In 1270, ill and failing, he set off again on Crusade but got no farther than Tunis before he died. His bones were brought back and buried in the abbey of Saint Denis, to become the object of intense veneration.

Following his death, the French monarchy was left in a state of such spiritual and political dominance that it looked unchallengeable, not only in France but in Europe. Under the two kings whose reigns saw out the century, the movement toward territorial enlargement and centralization of power swept on with a new ruthlessness.

During the fifteen-year tenure of Louis's son Philip III, the royal lands were swelled by important acquisitions, most notably the county of Champagne. Long one of the richest and most independent of the great principalities and geographically central to the consolidation of royal territories, the county was united with the domain by the betrothal of its three-year-old heiress to the king's son and successor. By the time of Philip's death, in 1285, the royal domain far outweighed in size and wealth the remaining duchies of Brittany, Burgundy, Gascony, and the county of Flanders.

In a detail from the statued facade of Rheims Cathedral, a Crusader receives consecrated bread and wine from the hands of a priest. The Crusades, launched in 109.5, continued to draw thousands of Christian warriors throughout the thirteenth century. Of the many European notables who took the cross, the most ardent was King Louis IX of France—canonized a mere twenty-seven years after his death—who even built a port at Aigues-Mortes on the Rhone delta from which his Crusading armies could depart. The two Crusades on which he embarked were failures, however: In 1250, Louis was captured in a fruitless assault on Egypt, and in 1270, he died while besieging the North African port of Tunis. By the end of the century, the last Christian territories in Palestine had fallen to the Mamiuk rulers of Egypt, and the movement was virtually at an end.

The new king, Philip's seventeen-year-old son, Philip IV, continued the trend toward centralization. Under the relentlessly efficient influence of a new breed of university-trained lawyer-politicians who were guided by Roman civil law rather than the clerical tenets of Louis IX's time, a naked determination to extend direct royal control into all corners and all levels of France emerged as the chief preoccupation of the government.

One of the major targets was the power of the papacy in France. King and pope were soon at odds about the right of the monarch to exact levies from the Church without the pope's permission. The argument escalated into a conflict over the fundamental issue of papal authority. Not until 1303 was the issue settled, when Philip took the drastic step of abducting the pope. When a Frenchman was elected pope in 1305, the papacy was transferred to Avignon, just outside French territory.

To combat the papal threat to his sovereignty, Philip and his advisers sought to

Recruit the sympsithies of the three estates of the realm: clergy, nobles, and townspeople. Representatives of all three were several times summoned to meetings with the king. The expedient provided an invaluable two-way channel of communication: The king was able to explain his case and to receive in return the endorsement of the people for his policies. The meetings, however, had no legal power to bind the French king; among his own people Philip's sovereignty was untrameled.

A Pagan Survival

A popular subject for sculptors working in the new Gothic style during the thirteenth century was the foliate head, or Green Man, whose face, shrouded in leaves, appeared in the stonework and woodwork of churches throughout Europe.

A pagan leftover, probably evolving from Celtic or Roman gods, the Green Man originally presented a demonic countenance to inspire fear in early churchgoers, who associated the natural world with lust and sin. Gothic sculptors transformed the leafy head into a benign image symbolizing renewal and resurrection. The elevation of the Green Man's character enabled sculptors to portray him in central positions within churches and even in association with Christianity's most sacred figures, Christ and the Virgin Mary.

Philip's mastery of his remaining feudal vassals was less certain. The two most powerful were the duke of Gascony alias the king of England (by this time Edward I, Henry Ill's son) and the count of Flanders. In 1297, goaded by Philip's interference in their affairs, the two powers came together in an alliance reminiscent of the Bouvines campaign. Edward and the Flemish count were at first outmaneuvered by Philip. But the Flemings so resented the way the French wielded their resulting control that in 1302 they massacred occupying Frenchmen and collaborators in Bruges. The revolt continued, bringing down on them in vengeance a thundering host of fully caparisoned French knights.

Yet times were changing. When the two forces met at the battle of Courtrai in 1 302, the overweening French cavalry, careless in their knightly superiority, foundered on the bristling pikes of ranks of Flemish foot soldiers. Philip was forced to settle with Edward and failed in renewed efforts to subdue Flanders.

The financial costs of Philip's campaigns were crippling. They led him ever further

A profusion of curved acjnihus loaves forms a foliate head in Bamberg Cathedral in Germany. This Crer'n Man adorns the console of "The Bam-trerg horseman," an equestrian st. stue that ' cninates the cathedral.

Into new exactions, which alienated and alarmed important groups. Mounting provincial resentment greeted the continuing encroachments of his central control. Trouble was brewing that would boil over in the dark century to come.

In the time of Henry Ill's grandfather, England seemed to have a much more promising future than France—and a much stronger throne. For one thing, England had been conquered in the eleventh century by William, duke of Normandy, who had replaced its Anglo-Saxon landholding nobility with his own Norman vassals. These lords, having received their lands by direct royal grant, were beholden to the monarchy. As a result, the feudal system had a clearer shape than in France.

The situation grew more complicated in the mid-twelfth century, when young Henry Plantagenet, count of Anjou, added the throne of England to his existing French possessions. The task of administering lands that stretched from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees conditioned the nature and development of Angevin rule. Outlying regions, such as Ireland and Brittany or the Welsh and Scottish marches, were left under the control of virtually independent lords. In the Angevin heartlands of England, Normandy, Anjou, Maine, and Touraine, however, the king governed through local officials—in England a justiciar, on the Continent seneschals—who answered directly to him. Written instructions were sent to these local officials, traveling commissioners monitored the workings of the organization, and the king

A Green Man takes a rare aggressive attitude.

Foliage adorns a Poitiers choir stall.

A foliate head in Winchester exudes benign calm.

Himself was ceaselessly on the move. With his itinerant court, he migrated from one province to another to review the whole process, try cases, and answer complaints, halting to see the queen through another confinement or even perhaps to gather the scattered family together for a brief Christmas reunion before moving on again.

The administration of England was only one of an Angevin king's preoccupations, albeit an important one. The English vassals now part of this empire resented the expansion of the Angevin administration, the demands for money, the interference in local and personal affairs, but at least the king was not always present to irritate them. Richard, Henry's heir, was in England only about one year in his eleven-year reign, and John, Richard's brother and successor, stayed away for the first four years of his rule, apart from a three-week visit for his coronation in 1199.

These circumstances changed after the loss of the French provinces to Philip II and the defeat at Bouvines in 1214. Deprived of his favorite continental lands, John was now forced to reside more or less permanently in his English realm. Equally, many of the king's vassals who had held lands spread widely through the Angevin territories now found themselves confined to their English possessions.

John never gained the affection of his vassals, although some of his advisers were conspicuously loyal. His enemies pictured him as a villain of cruelty, lechery, avarice, and cowardice, perhaps because his continual conflicts with the Church—he was excommunicated in 1208 and regained favor in 1213 only by making his kingdom a papal fief—alienated the monasteries where the chronicles detailing his crimes were composed. More objective documentary evidence of John's reign shows him to have been at his best an energetic and meticulous administrator. He was an educated man who was always surrounded by books—often historical chronicles— but he had the ungovernable temper typical of the Angevin family. Minor vexations had been known to send his father, Henry II, into tantrums in which he would tear off his clothes and chew the straw covering the floor beneath his feet. John was no more stable, alternating between bouts of energetic decisiveness and an inexplicable, disabling lethargy.

It was not just John's personality, though, that caused problems on his return to England in 1214. Lacking the enormous resources of the Capetians, he had exhausted his exchequer by the export of huge quantities of silver to pay for the French expedition. Many of the lords and barons whom he had summoned to feudal service had failed to campaign and had sent none of the knights they owed. During his absence, the kingdom had been left in the hands of administrators—some of them not English—who were unaccountable to anyone but the monarch.

The result was a sharp increase in friction between the king and the powerful magnates of the land. John resorted to ever-more-savage fiscal measures in order to remain solvent. During his reign, succession dues, payable by a baron on accession to his title, rose from 100 marks to sums that were as high as 10,000 marks. The fines exacted by the king's justices for even the most minor of misdemeanors spiraled upward alarmingly. King John was eminently capable of stooping to outright blackmail to raise funds; a record from his exchequer reveals that one northern baron had to offer the king five first-class palfreys in 1210 "that he would keep quiet about the wife of Henry Pinel," paying in addition a large sum to regain the "goodwill" of the king. John was also prepared to use the nobles' own wives in his questionable dealings; another record reveals that "the wife of Hugh Neville promises the lord king two hundred chickens that she might lie one night with her husband." The monarch's

An ardent experimenter, the English scientist Roger Bacon diagramed the refraction of light entering the human eye. Realizing the potential of artificial lenses, Bacon noted that convex lenses could be helpful for reading, a suggestion that heralded Europe's first use of spectacles. He even theorized that huge refractive mirrors might be built so nations could spy on their enemies. A mathematician, alchemist, and practitioner of the occult. Bacon was born around 1214 and lived at a time when the works of Aristotle and other Creek philosophers were being rediscovered in the West.

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Exactions raised a growing discontent that peaked following the defeat at Bouvines.

During the winter that followed John's return from France, he attempted to collect payments in lieu of service from those who had refused to campaign. The barons resisted openly, demanding that the despotic innovations of the Angevin regime be thrown out and that the customs of Anglo-Norman days be restored. John played for time, even going so far as to take Crusading vows, thus putting himself and his property under the protection of the Church. Meanwhile he sent hastily to Aquitaine and Flanders for mercenaries to crush the rebels. Before they could arrive in force, the barons repudiated their oaths of fealty and took up arms. They failed to capture the important town of Northampton, but Bedford opened its gates to them, and they were also able to occupy London, never a stronghold of loyalty to the Angevins. Under pressure from moderate advisers in his court, John asked for a truce.

In June of 1215, the two sides conducted detailed negotiations at the meadow of Runnymede, about twenty miles up the Thames River from London. By the terms of the agreement they finally reached, the barons renewed their loyalty to the king in return for the issue of the document that came to be known as the Magna Carta, the Great Charter. Its sixty-three clauses consisted of specific promises extracted from the king to redress the barons' complaints.

The force of the charter's most important provisions was to assert the supremacy of the rule of law over the arbitrary power of the king. So, in the thirty-ninth clause, the king proclaimed, "No free man shall be taken or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or in any way ruined, nor will we go or send against him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land." There was no abstract attempt to define the law; ancient customs such as trial by ordeal or judicial duel were not dead, yet objective inquiries and the taking of evidence were well established, too. What the king's opponents forced him to concede was that he was not entitled to proceed against free men on his own whim.

Another central provision was the stipulation that no extraordinary payments be made to the crown, whether in lieu of military service or for special needs as they arose, except with the consent of "the common counsel of our realm"—an advisory body comprising, in theory, all who held land directly from the king. Many clauses were devoted to making the justice of the royal courts more promptly and effectively available; others limited the numerous devices that the Angevins had developed for transferring money from their subjects' pockets to their own. Certain paragraphs were no more than restatements of time-honored customs that the autocratic Angevins had come to ignore; some simply named hated royal agents and announced that their careers were henceforth at an end. The merchant community of London was rewarded for its support of the barons with guarantees of freedom of movement for goods and an attempt at standardizing currency and weights and measures. Perhaps the most limiting feature of the whole agreement from the royal point of view was that twenty-five of the barons were nominated as a tribunal, to which complaints could be addressed concerning breaches of the charter. As such, it had the power to restrain the king, if necessary by force.

In retrospect, the Magna Carta can be seen as a milestone on the path away from autocracy. In the short term, however, the momentous charter could not prevent England from collapsing into chaos. It was impossible for John's government to cope with the volume of work called for, and some ambitious barons, still hoping to overthrow )ohn, actively sought to renew the conflict. Despite the assistance of Prince Louis's invading French troops, who temporarily occupied London, the barons failed to make much headway. |ohn had had time to put an effective mercenary force in the field, and the French invasion bogged down.

But John was by now ill with dysentery and weakening fast. Disaster struck on October 12, 1216. Returning with his army from breaking a rebel siege at Lincoln, John became separated from his baggage train in the fenlands of Cambridgeshire, near the coast of the great bay called the Wash. Attempting a shortcut across the tidal estuary of the Wellstream River, the packhorses and their drivers came to grief. In the words of a contemporary chronicler, "Many members of his household were submerged in the waters of the sea and sucked into the quicksand there, because they had set out incautiously and hastily before the tide had receded." In the accident, John lost a great deal of his harshly exacted wealth, as well as many of his household effects. Fie did not long survive the disaster. Within just one week's time, in the castle of Newark, he was dead.

Flis nine-year-old son was speedily crowned king as Flenry III; a decisive victory over the invaders and their allies in May of 121 7, followed by the destruction of a fleet of reinforcements in August, sent Louis back to France with a face-saving truce; and the Magna Carta was reissued (though without the committee of twenty-five barons) to confirm that the gains of the civil war were not to be reversed. The party of the rebels melted away.

During Henry's minority, a degree of order returned to England under the regency of William Marshall. After the regent's death in 1219, the young king began increasingly to assume power. England was still under the theoretical protection of the pope, however, and it was 1223 before the king got papal approval to rule the country "principally by the counsel of his own servants." That Henry derived his authority from the pope rather than his people was greeted with suspicion by the great lords; they also mistrusted their exclusion from the king's confidence by an inner circle of royal advisers—skilled, ambitious men who were often not even English, although they might be rewarded with English lands and titles. In 1225, a further reissue of the Great Charter in return for a general grant of money reassured the barons; nevertheless, the gulf between king and magnates continued to widen.

At twenty, with the approval of the pope, Henry came of age. For almost all his long reign—he died in 1272—he faced his near-contemporary Louis IX across the Channel, and the rivalry he felt for the French king was a lasting theme of Henry's life. He did not profit by the comparison, for Louis easily outdid him in piety and prestige as well as political achievements. Yet he was a generous and perceptive patron of the arts, and although Henry's reign saw a renewed episode of civil war, he left the kingdom at his death more united and prosperous than it had been at his accession.

Nonetheless, as a young king, he was soon alienating the barons by his highhanded actions. He dispensed with his moderate and trustworthy justiciar, Hubert de Burgh, and deprived that office of its former power; new appointees carried out a thorough reform of the administration, both local and central. The chief organ of government became the king's council, a restricted group whose members took a formal oath of office. It included both magnates and ministers, but it was the full-time administrators who held the greatest influence, thanks to their professional expertise and their closeness to the king.

Henry also infuriated his subjects by his apparent love of foreigners. In 1236, he

Figures of an apostle and a saint, adorning the sumptuous ecclesiastical cloak known as the Syon Cope, exemplify the style of embroidery known as opus Angli-canum, or "English work." Richly decorated with gold and silver thread and studded with precious stones, such garments were prized by popes and emperors and were considered sufficiently valuable to be accepted as security for loans. Merchants made special arrangements for their export, concealing them within bundles of ordinary cloth before risking them upon the pirate-infested seas of Europe.

Married Eleanor of Provence, a sister of the French queen, who brought a number of her relatives with her from Savoy to England. Two years later, the king's own sister, also called Eleanor, took a French husband, Simon de Montfort. Increasingly, the English barons were pushed to one side as Henry appointed his new French relatives to earldoms and bishoprics.

To the barons it appeared as if all the gains of 1215 were being rapidly eroded. The king was becoming more and more autocratic, and the foreign administrators who had been a hated hallmark of John's reign seemed once more to be getting the upper hand. Moreover, Henry appeared to be uncomfortably dominated by the pope. He was reported to have said, "I neither wish nor dare to oppose the lord pope in anything." By 1 238, Henry's unpopularity had reached such heights that to safeguard against assassins, he thought it prudent to have bars fitted not only to the windows of all his chambers but to the outflow of the royal lavatory at Westminster.

The nationalistic emotions that Henry aroused among his barons were not assuaged by his attempts to regain the Angevin territories in France. In 1242, Henry became involved in a campaign in Poitou on the instigation of his mother, who had married a French lord with claims to the province. It ended disastrously, leading ultimately to the Treaty of Paris in 1259, with Henry paying homage to his brother-in-law Louis for Gascony and formally renouncing all claim to the remaining Angevin lands.

The barons were strongly opposed to Henry's French adventures and to other extravagant foreign undertakings in which he dabbled—especially his acceptance of Pope Innocent IV's offer of the crown of Sicily for his son Edmund (prior to its acceptance by Charles of Anjou). This ill-judged project involved Henry in an expensive and embarrassing failure that further increased the barons' resentment of the pope's political influence over the king. Henry had similarly disturbed the English bishops by his willingness to allow the pope to bestow offices and raise money from the Church in England without deference to their wishes. When one papal legate arrived in 1245 to impose levies on the clergy, the English magnates told him that he would be torn to pieces if he did not depart.

In 1258, a crisis arose. Resentful at the growing number of foreigners at the court, dissatisfied with the way the country was being governed, and stung by their lack of influence with the monarch, the magnates refused to grant Henry the money he desperately needed to finance his rash enterprises abroad. Specifically, they took exception to a demand for a tax to subsidize Henry's Sicilian ambitions and to the activities of Henry's fortune-seeking half-brothers, who had arrived from Poitou in 1247. Exerting pressure that stopped just short of armed coercion, the barons made the king promise to obey their advice in all matters, placing him under the direction of fifteen baronial councilors. They went on to make detailed and significant proposals for reform. Regular meetings of the council of magnates, now coming to be known as parliaments, were to be held three times a year for baronial representatives to discuss the affairs of the realm. The chief officials of the kingdom were to be responsible to the council. At a local level, knights were to hear complaints and present them to a justiciar appointed by the barons. Knights representing the shire communities— where the lesser gentry had long played a part in local administration—

Vignelles ol a Prosperoos Era

In England and France, Ihe Ihirleenlh cen-lury was a lime of burgeoning populations and widening horizons. Forests were felled and marshlands drained to provide new land for cultivalion. Relative political sla-bilily encouraged the spread of agricultural lechnology: Windmills, introduced inlo Europe during the twelfth century, now became widespread, and increased use was made of such fertilizers as the mineral-rich sediment marl.

Towns expanded, fed by agricultural surpluses and enriched by profits from fairs and markets. Many larger cities purchased charters for self-government, thus freeing Ihemselves from exploitation by feudal overlords or Ihe Church.

This prosperous world, embellished with the glories of Gothic architecture and enriched by a growing number of schools and universities, is reflected in the pages of the Luttrell Psalter. Vignettes of English life crowd the margins of this book of psalms produced for an English noble in the early fourteenth century.

Were summoned to some parliaments. A regular forum was developing for consultation on the affairs of the realm, and the practice of selecting representatives of large groups was gaining currency.

But Henry's resentment at the controls imposed on him led inevitably to renewed conflict. After skirting civil war for several years, in 1263 the barons and the king agreed to refer their dispute to independent arbitration. Their choice of mediator was Louis IX of France, whose reputation for moral rectitude had become such that even his old rivals accorded him their grudging admiration. Louis's own belief in royal sovereignty brought him down against the barons, and his judgment released Henry from all the restrictions they had laid on him. The barons—now led by Simon de Montfort, a man of stature whose idealism had separated him from the self-interest and incompetence of the king—could not accept the negation of their achievement, and there was no escape from war.

Initially the barons were successful, capturing the king in battle at Lewes in 1264. But the provisional government set up by Montfort in the king's name lacked popular support, and the next year, further hostilities resulted in a final defeat for the king's opponents at Evesham, where Montfort was slain and brutally mutilated.

Among the heroes of the day at Evesham was Henry's son and heir, Edward. Unlike his father, Edward was a courageous and effective military leader who loved war and tournaments and cherished the traditions of chivalry. Tall and curly-haired, the young prince's imposing presence was marred only by a slight lisp and a drooping left eyelid. A true Angevin, Edward had a volatile temper—on one occasion he chased a hunting companion with drawn sword for failing to control a falcon properly—but this flaw was tempered by a deep sense of piety and a keen intelligence, which he honed with games of chess.

After the victory at Evesham, Edward emerged as an influential force in the governing of the land, and he duly ascended the throne as King Edward I on his father's death in 1272. Despite the defeat of the reformers, in the intervening years he had shown an awareness of the need for change, and throughout his reign he continued and extended the practice of summoning parliaments. As the highest court in the land. Parliament became the arena in which Edward enacted a great series of statutes aimed at providing remedies for specific grievances, from measures for preventing subinfeudation—a process by which lands were split up through inheritance into ever-smaller circles of feudal obligation—to provisions for the care of the roads.

Sheltered from Ihe elements and from prying eyes, the ladies of a royal court travel in a carriage large enough to accommodate many servants and lap dogs.

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Each parliament was summoned for a range of purposes: to hear petitions and judicial appeals, to grant taxes, and to assent to acts of the king. Magnates and bishops were individually summoned; knights of the shire and burgesses from the boroughs were sometimes called to act as representatives of their communities; and later in the century, members of the lesser clergy were also given a voice.

Edward's reign saw many investigations into the way the country was governed. The first of these, initiated in 1 274, sent out royal commissioners to establish who was wielding what powers throughout the realm. Though designed to determine whether the rights of the crown were being usurped, the investigation produced numerous examples of the abuse of power; a prior of Spalding in Lincolnshire, for instance, was discovered to have detained a man unjustifiably and in such bad conditions that his feet had rotted away. The scandals were subsequently dealt with by parliamentary legislation. More important still were the quo warranto inquiries, initiated in 1278, which established the principle that all jurisdictional rights were delegated by the Crown. As in France, regional authority was being transmuted into that of the realm.

The main task for which the borough and shire representatives were required was to grant the king money for wars that could no longer be waged solely with the resources provided by traditional feudal obligations of military service. Succeeding English kings had tried to extend their dominion into the unassimilated corners of the British Isles, but both Wales and Scotland had resisted effective intrusion into their Celtic hinterlands—though at the price of formally acknowledging the overlordship of the English king. The Welsh chieftains in particular had taken advantage of the chaos during the later years of Henry Ill's reign to renounce their allegiance and had risen in revolt. Their leader was Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, recognized by a treaty with the English in 1267 as prince of Wales, the first time such a title had been used. When Llywelyn refused homage to Edward, the scene was set for a showdown that was to prove disastrous to the Welsh cause.

Edward launched a crushingly effective invasion in 1277 that deprived Llywelyn of all but a portion of his lands. Leniently treated after his first defeat, the prince revolted again in 1282 in resentment at the spread of English influence in the principality. This time Edward determined to show no mercy, revealing a newly aggressive and expansionist side to the power of the English state. By 1284, he had destroyed forever the ability of the Welsh to resist and had built a chain of new towns and castles to integrate the land into the English administration.

Servants prepare a banquet for their masters, whose rich diet was often enhanced by the addition of Oriental spices.

His army reinforced by large bodies of Welsh archers, Edward next looked to Scotland, which, traditionally linked with France, was a potent