History of France | Page 7

horribly harassed by the Mamelukes, who threw among his host a
strange burning missile, called Greek fire; and he was finally forced to
surrender himself as a prisoner at Mansourah, with all his army. He
obtained his release by giving up Damietta, and paying a heavy ransom.
After twenty years, in 1270, he attempted another crusade, which was
still more unfortunate, for he landed at Tunis to wait for his brother to
arrive from Sicily, apparently on some delusion of favourable
dispositions on the part of the Bey. Sickness broke out in the camp, and
the king, his daughter, and his third son all died of fever; and so fatal
was the expedition, that his son Philip III. returned to France escorting
five coffins, those of his father, his brother, his sister and her husband,
and his own wife and child.
11. Philip the Fair.--The reign of _Philip III._ was very short. The
insolence and cruelty of the Provençals in Sicily had provoked the
natives to a massacre known as the Sicilian Vespers, and they then
called in the King of Aragon, who finally obtained the island, as a
separate kingdom from that on the Italian mainland where Charles of
Anjou and his descendants still reigned. While fighting his uncle's
battles on the Pyrenees, and besieging Gerona, Philip III. caught a fever,
and died on his way home in 1285. His successor, _Philip IV., called
the Fair_, was crafty, cruel, and greedy, and made the Parliament of
Paris the instrument of his violence and exactions, which he carried out
in the name of the law. To prevent Guy de Dampierre, Count of
Flanders, from marrying his daughter to the son of Edward I. of
England, he invited her and her father to his court, and threw them both

into prison, while he offered his own daughter Isabel to Edward of
Carnarvon in her stead. The Scottish wars prevented Edward I. from
taking up the cause of Guy; but the Pope, Boniface VIII., a man of a
fierce temper, though of a great age, loudly called on Philip to do
justice to Flanders, and likewise blamed in unmeasured terms his
exactions from the clergy, his debasement of the coinage, and his foul
and vicious life. Furious abuse passed on both sides. Philip availed
himself of a flaw in the Pope's election to threaten him with deposition,
and in return was excommunicated. He then sent a French knight
named William de Nogaret, with Sciarra Colonna, a turbulent Roman,
the hereditary enemy of Boniface, and a band of savage mercenary
soldiers to Anagni, where the Pope then was, to force him to recall the
sentence, apparently intending them to act like the murderers of Becket.
The old man's dignity, however, overawed them at the moment, and
they retired without laying hands on him, but the shock he had
undergone caused his death a few days later. His successor was
poisoned almost immediately on his election, being known to be
adverse to Philip. Parties were equally balanced in the conclave; but
Philip's friends advised him to buy over to his interest one of his
supposed foes, whom they would then unite in choosing. Bertrand de
Goth, Archbishop of Bordeaux, was the man, and in a secret interview
promised Philip to fulfil six conditions if he were made Pope by his
interest. These were: 1st, the reconciliation of Philip with the Church;
2nd, that of his agents; 3rd, a grant to the king of a tenth of all clerical
property for five years; 4th, the restoration of the Colonna family to
Rome; 5th, the censure of Boniface's memory. These five were carried
out by Clement V., as he called himself, as soon as he was on the Papal
throne; the sixth remained a secret, but was probably the destruction of
the Knights Templars. This order of military monks had been created
for the defence of the crusading kingdom of Jerusalem, and had
acquired large possessions in Europe. Now that their occupation in the
East was gone, they were hated and dreaded by the kings, and Philip
was resolved on their wholesale destruction.
12. The Papacy at Avignon.--Clement had never quitted France, but
had gone through the ceremonies of his installation at Lyons; and
Philip, fearing that in Italy he would avoid carrying out the scheme for

the ruin of the Templars, had him conducted to Avignon, a city of the
Empire which belonged to the Angevin King of Naples, as Count of
Provence, and there for eighty years the Papal court remained. As they
were thus settled close to the French frontier, the Popes became almost
vassals of France; and this added greatly to the power and renown of
the French kings. How real their hold on the Papacy was, was shown in
the ruin of the