many ecclesiastics showed symptoms of opposition, and Pope Clement IV. gave the king nothing but ambiguous and very reserved counsel. When he learned that Louis was taking with him on the crusade three of his sons, aged respectively twenty-two, eighteen, and seventeen, he could not refrain from writing to the Cardinal of St. Cecile, “It doth not strike us as an act of well-balanced judgment to impose the taking of the cross upon so many of the king’s sons, and especially the eldest; and, albeit we have heard reasons to the contrary, either we be much mistaken or they are utterly devoid of reason.” Even the king’s personal condition was matter for grave anxiety. His health was very much enfeebled; and several of his most intimate and most far-seeing advisers were openly opposed to his design. He vehemently urged Joinville to take the cross again with him; but Joinville refused downright. “I thought,” said he, “that they all committed a mortal sin to advise him the voyage, because the whole kingdom was in fair peace at home and with all neighbors, and, so soon as he departed, the state of the kingdom did nought but worsen. They also committed a great sin to advise him the voyage in the great state of weakness in which his body was, for he could not bear to go by chariot or to ride; he was so weak that he suffered me to carry him in my arms from the hotel of the Count of Auxerre, the place where I took leave of him, to the Cordeliers. And nevertheless, weak as he was, had he remained in France, he might have lived yet a while and wrought much good.”
All objections, all warnings, all anxieties came to nothing in the face of Louis’s fixed idea and pious passion. He started from Paris on the 16th of March, 1270, a sick man almost already, but with soul content, and probably the only one without misgiving in the midst of all his comrades. It was once more at Aigues-Mortes that he went to embark. All was as yet dark and undecided as to the plan of the expedition. Was Egypt, or Palestine, or Constantinople, or Tunis, to be the first point of attack? Negotiations, touching this subject, had been opened with the Venetians and the Genoese without arriving at any conclusion or certainty. Steps were taken at haphazard with full trust in Providence and utter forgetfulness that Providence does not absolve men from foresight. On arriving at Aigues-Mortes about the middle of May, Louis found nothing organized, nothing in readiness, neither crusaders nor vessels; everything was done slowly, incompletely, and with the greatest irregularity. At last, on the 2d of July, 1270, he set sail without any one’s knowing and without the king’s telling any one whither they were going. It was only in Sardinia, after four days’ halt at Cagliari, that Louis announced to the chiefs of the crusade, assembled aboard his ship the Mountjoy, that he was making for Tunis, and that their Christian work would commence there. The King of Tunis (as he was then called), Mohammed Mostanser, had for some time been talking of his desire to become a Christian, if he could be efficiently protected against the seditions of his subjects. Louis welcomed with transport the prospect of Mussulman conversions. “Ah!” he cried, “if I could only see myself the gossip and sponsor of so great a godson!”
But on the 17th of July, when the fleet arrived before Tunis, the admiral, Florent de Varennes, probably without the king’s orders and with that want of reflection which was conspicuous at each step of the enterprise, immediately took possession of the harbor and of some Tunisian vessels as prize, and sent word to the king “that he had only to support him and that the disembarkation of the troops might be effected in perfect safety.” Thus war was commenced at the very first moment against the Mussulman prince whom there had been a promise of seeing before long a Christian.
At the end of a fortnight, after some fights between the Tunisians and the crusaders, so much political and military blindness produced its natural consequences. The re-enforcements promised to Louis, by his brother Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily, had not arrived; provisions were falling short; and the heats of an African summer were working havoc amongst the army with such rapidity that before long there was no time to bury the dead, but they were cast pell-mell into the ditch which surrounded the camp, and the air was tainted thereby. On the 3d of August Louis was attacked by the epidemic fever, and obliged to keep his bed in his tent. He asked news of his son John Tristan, Count of Nevers, who had fallen ill before him, and whose recent death, aboard the vessel to which he had been removed in hopes that the sea air might be beneficial, had been carefully concealed from him. The count, as well as the Princess Isabel, married to Theobald the Young, King of Navarre, was a favorite child of Louis, who, on hearing of his loss, folded his hands and sought in silence and prayer some assuagement of his grief. His malady grew worse; and having sent for his successor, Prince Philip (Philip the Bold), he took from his hour-book some instructions which he had written out for him, with his own hand and in French, and delivered them to him, bidding him to observe them scrupulously. He gave likewise to his daughter Isabel, who was weeping at the foot of his bed, and to his son-in-law the King of Navarre, some writings which had been intended for them, and he further charged Isabel to deliver another to her youngest sister, Agnes, affianced to the Duke of Burgundy. “Dearest daughter,” said he, “think well hereon: full many folk have fallen asleep with wild thoughts of sin, and in the morning their place hath not known them.” Just after he had finished satisfying his paternal solicitude, it was announced to him, on the 24th of August, that envoys from the Emperor Michael Palaeologus had landed at Cape Carthage, with orders to demand his intervention with his brother Charles, King of Sicily, to deter him from making war on the but lately re-established Greek empire. Louis summoned all his strength to receive them in his tent, in the presence of certain of his counsellors, who were uneasy at the fatigue he was imposing upon himself. “I promise you, if I live,” said he to the envoys, “to cooperate, so far as I may be able, in what your master demands of me; meanwhile, I exhort you to have patience, and be of good courage.” This was his last political act, and his last concern with the affairs of the world; henceforth he was occupied only with pious effusions which had a bearing at one time on his hopes for his soul, at another on those Christian interests which had been so dear to him all his life. He kept repeating his customary orisons in a low voice, and he was heard murmuring these broken words: “Fair Sir God, have mercy on this people that bideth here, and bring them back to their own land! Let them not fall into the hands of their enemies, and let them not be constrained to deny Thy name!” And at the same time that he thus expressed his sad reflections upon the situation in which he was leaving his army and his people, he cried from time to time, as he raised himself on his bed, “Jerusalem! Jerusalem! We will go up to Jerusalem!” During the night of the 24th 25th of August he ceased to speak, all the time continuing to show that he was in full possession of his senses; he insisted upon receiving extreme unction out of bed, and lying upon a coarse sack-cloth covered with cinders, with the cross before him; and on Monday, the 25th of August, 1270, at three P.M., he departed in peace, whilst uttering these his last words: “Father, after the example of the Divine Master, into Thy hands I commend my spirit!”
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE KINGSHIP IN FRANCE.
That the kingship occupied an important place and played an important part in the history of France is an evident and universally recognized fact. But to what causes this fact was due, and what particular characteristics gave the kingship in France that preponderating influence which, in weal and in woe, it exercised over the fortunes of the country, is a question which has been less closely examined, and which still remains vague and obscure. This question it is which we would now shed light upon and determine with some approach to precision. We cannot properly comprehend and justly appreciate a great historical force until we have seen it issuing from its primary source and followed it in its various developments.
At the first glance, two facts strike us in the history of the kingship in France. It was in France that it adopted soonest and most persistently maintained its fundamental principle, heredity. In the other monarchical states of Europe—in England, in Germany, in Spain, and in Italy—divers principles, at one time election, and at another right of conquest, have
