21. Philip IV.
CHAPTER XXI. Philip IV. (1286-1314)
The son of Philip III. was Philip IV., called Le Bel because he was very handsome. He was never liked by the people, for which they had many and good reasons. When he became king, he was only seventeen years old, but he never behaved like a young man. He did not care for pleasures of any sort, for hunting, or tournaments, or the company of his barons and courtiers; but he liked to be shut up all day with lawyers, who were inventing ways to give to the kings of France more power than they had already, and to get Philip plenty of money from his subjects, which they did without at all considering how unpleasant it might be for the subjects to do without their riches.
He had a wife of whom horrible stories are told. One was how she used to sit up in a tower in Paris, looking out upon the people who went by, and when she saw anyone whose looks she liked, she called to them to come in and pay her a visit; and if they came, she made them stay till night, and then took them to the top of her tower, and pushed them into the river which flowed underneath, and drowned them. Of course this story is not true. It is a legend or wild tale told about a particular castle near the river Seine in Paris; and it is not always told about the same person. Sometimes it is about one of the wives of Philip's sons; but it shows how the people hated all this family, and were ready to listen to horrible stories about any of them. A few years after Philip became king there was a war between him and Edward III. of England.
I have told you already of many wars in France, but till now they have nearly all, except the Crusades, been wars of the same kind; that is, wars between a king and one of his great vassals. Even when Philip Augustus fought with Henry, King of England, and his sons, it was a war between a sovereign and his vassals, because Henry and his sons, though they were kings of England and had no one over them there, were vassals of the French king for the land which they had in France. In the reign of Philip IV. the English kings were still vassals for one or two French provinces, but they were now completely Englishmen, and as kings of England had grown so strong, that when they fought, the war was between one king and another, one country and another, between England and France, instead of between a sovereign and his vassal. The sovereign was the name of the king, duke, or count who gave the land on conditions to the vassal, as I have explained before. Sovereign has now come to mean merely the chief ruler of a country.
The sailors of Edward III. and the people who lived on the sea-coast of France often met and quarrelled. Edward had some land of his own in France, the part which St. Louis had given to his father, that there might be peace and friendship between them. His subjects helped the English seamen against Philip's subjects, and at last the quarrel became a regular war, in which, however, neither of the kings took much part. Philip was busy with his lawyers in Paris, and Edward was fighting the Welsh and Scotch, and had no time to think about his affairs in France. Philip was much more cunning than Edward. He watched his opportunity, and managed in rather a deceitful way to make himself master of Aquitaine, the part of France which had belonged to the English king, and to keep it, which Edward allowed him to do, being too much taken up with other matters to care much about it.
Philip had many disputes with the Pope of those days, Boniface VIII. The story of their quarrels is not a very amusing one, and I will not tell it here. It is enough to know that the beginning of the quarrel was about the question whether or not the clergy of France should pay taxes to the king, as the rest of the people did. Taxes are the money which people pay to their rulers, to be spent in the expenses of governing the country. It had always been a question whether or not the clergy in the country should pay taxes. Many of them were very rich, and the kings said that as the clergy had as much good as other people from the soldiers, the sailors, and the judges of the countries, they ought to be willing to take their share in paying for it. The Pope always said that the clergy in all the different countries of Europe were his subjects, and were to think more of his commands than of the laws of the king in whose country they lived. He was very angry, therefore, at the king wishing to make them pay taxes. The quarrel began about this question, and it lasted all through the lifetime of the Pope. The king was the conqueror at last.
Philip was a very severe king. He made all his subjects do whatever he liked, without allowing them to say whether they wished for anything different. Among other things, he made them pay him great quantities of money. It is said that by doing this, he made himself as odious to his people as Louis IX. had been dear to them. He made laws about everything, and every one who broke his laws was to pay him a fine. Some of these were wise and useful laws, as those in which were arranged who should judge the people, and where they should meet together for any one who had been ill-treated to complain of it, and arrangements about communes and the people who lived in them.
But others of much less importance were much more unpleasant to the people. Philip made laws as to how many suits of clothes each person might have — a prince so many, a count or a duke so many, a knight so many. The greatest number allowed was four; the ladies were to have no more than their husbands. Boys were to have two suits of clothes a year, but King Philip seems to have made no law for girls. He also settled how many dishes people were to have for dinner, and how their food was to be prepared. The people naturally disliked extremely having these rules, and having to pay for breaking them.
But there were some of his subjects to whom Philip behaved with especial cruelty, and among these were the Jews. This unfortunate nation has no country of its own; the Jews wander from one country to another, each particular family settling itself in any place where it sees an opportunity of making money, and setting up a comfortable home. The Jews settled in France were among the richest of Philip's subjects, for they understood more about how to do business, and how to get together a great deal of money, than any other people of that time. Philip protected them when first he became king, and when they had had time to grow rich, turned upon them, seized all their goods, and then drove them all out of the country. The unhappy Jews had before this been treated in the same way by Edward I. of England.
Philip had many wars with the Count of Flanders. Flanders was the country which is now Belgium, at the north-east corner of France. It was at that time part of France, but like so many other provinces, was ruled by a count of its own, who was always ready to resist the king. When Edward of England wanted to find some one to help him against Philip, he made friends with the Count of Flanders, who gave him much useful help against the King of France. When Philip made peace with Edward, he still went on fighting with Guy of Flanders, and when he found that he could not conquer him in open war, he persuaded Guy by false promises to come to his court with his eldest sons and some of his chief lords, and to give up to him the keys of his chief city, and of all the fortresses that were still his; for Philip had already taken away many of them. The promise was that if Guy would do this, he should afterwards be sent back to Flanders with all his old powers, and be disturbed no more; but as soon as Philip had all he wanted, Guy with his sons and great lords was thrown into prison, and Philip took Flanders as his own, and sent one of his officers to rule it for him.
Guy had not ruled his people well, and they had no great love for him. Philip made them many promises of good government, and they made no resistance to him, but received him splendidly when he went to visit Flanders in the same year in which Guy had been made prisoner. The people came out of the cities dressed in their best clothes, which were made of very fine and beautifully coloured cloth, and made processions and feasts of all kinds to do honour to King Philip. The French lords were vexed to see so many common people wearing such rich clothes, and Philip's wife, Jane of Navarre, said, "Till now I thought I was the only queen, but here I see more than six hundred others." The friendship between Philip and the Flemings did not last long. The French governor set over the people ill-treated them till they rose against him, and turned him out of the city where he lived, and formed themselves into an army with which to march against Philip. One of Guy's sons, who had been fighting in distant countries, came home when he heard of the rising up in Flanders, to put himself at the head of it. The Flemish had made up a large army, and in a battle at a place called Courtrai in Flanders, defeated the French soldiers as they had scarcely ever been defeated before. Great numbers of noblemen were killed, others fled from the field; the Flemings went to their tents and took from them great quantities of arms and rich clothes. It was thought very disgraceful that so many nobles should have been defeated by common citizens, such as most of the soldiers in the Flemish army were.
After this Philip could never make himself master in Flanders again. Two years later, after two more great battles, he found that they would never submit to him peaceably, and at last, tired of fighting, he agreed to set free the sons of Guy, whom he had been keeping prisoners, and to allow the eldest of them to be count, as his father had been. The old Count Guy had died in France.
This war was important, because it was owing partly to it that Philip spent so much money, and had to find so many ways of getting more, which was very unpleasant to his subjects; though, even allowing for all he had to spend, it is difficult to find out what became of all the immense sums of money he received in one way or another from his people. He certainly seemed to be always contriving new ways of making himself rich, and yet always to be in need of money.
Pope Boniface, who, as I said before, had a quarrel with Philip as to whether or not the clergy were to pay taxes, died just at the time when another quarrel was going on fiercely between them. The question this time was whether the Pope had any power over the king; whether the king was in all things to do as he pleased, or whether he was, in certain cases, to obey the Pope. The Pope wished the king to submit to him in questions about clergymen and churches and monasteries, and all that had to do with Church services, and settling who was to be archbishop, bishop, or abbot, and what the people were to be taught. Many of the kings said the Pope ought to have no power in their kingdoms, and Philip IV. was one of these, so long as the Pope displeased him, but if the Pope did as he wished, Philip told all his subjects to obey him. The Pope who came after Boniface was a friend of Philip's, and did whatever he wished. Philip, after all he had taken from his subjects, had still left some of them very rich, and there was one body of men from whom he had never yet taken anything. These were the Templars. The first Templars were a few brave knights who joined together in the Holy Land into a little army to fight for the Temple at Jerusalem. They were very brave and virtuous, so that other men admired them, and wished to become Templars also, and by degrees the "Order," as it was called, grew larger and larger. An Order means a body of men with a particular set of rules as to how they are to behave. The Order of Templars increased, till, in the time of Philip le Bel, there were as many as 15,000 of them in different parts of the world. While the Crusades lasted, they spent most of their time fighting in the Holy Land, and when the Crusades were at an end the Templars came back to Europe, and went to live in the different countries to which they belonged.
They were partly monks as well as soldiers; they made a vow to remain unmarried, and to give up their lives to fighting in the East, and to protecting the Christians there, and to follow certain rules which were made for them by St. Bernard, who, as you have already heard, lived in the reign of Louis VII. They did not obey any king or the Pope. One among them was chosen by the others to be their chief, and was called the Grand Master, and him they all obeyed. When the Order grew large there was a Grand Master in each country.
Philip could not bear that any of his subjects should refuse to obey him in everything, and he wished to be master of the riches of the Templars, which were very great, so he determined to destroy the Order with the help of the Pope, who was afraid to refuse him anything. On a particular day all the Templars in France were thrown into prison. The king sent out a notice, saying they had been put in prison because they were horribly wicked, and gave an account of some of the bad things which he supposed them to have done and to believe. He said that, they were not really Christians, that they wished the Saracens to conquer Europe, that they did all kinds of wicked things in secret, of which nobody knew. It was very hard to tell whether what the king said was true or not. Nobody is sure even now whether the Templars had become wicked, and had done bad things in secret. Many of the knights said that the king's story was entirely untrue; others said that it was partly true, and some of them, who had been kept in prison a long time, and then tortured to make them say what the king wished, said that his story was true. But many of these, when they came out of prison, unsaid all they had said, declaring they would have done anything to escape from the horrible tortures.
Whatever the Templars had done, they could hardly have deserved what happened to them. Many of them were kept in prison for their lives, and several of them were burned alive. The Grand Master of France was burned with one of his chief friends. All the wealth that had belonged to them was taken by Philip.
Of all the bad things done by Philip IV., this is what I think the worst. He died very soon after the death of the Grand Master and his friend. Pope Clement died at about the same time. Philip died at Fontainebleau, the place where he had been born, giving much wise and good advice to his eldest son, who was to be king after him, and who, it might be feared, would be at least as likely to follow the example of his father's life as the good advice which Philip gave only on his deathbed.
