In Southern France, at the foot of the Pyrenees, Philip the Handsome, just as his father, Philip the Bold, was, during the first years of his reign, at war with the Kings of Aragon, Alphonso III. and Jayme II.; but these campaigns, originating in purely local quarrels, or in the ties between the descendants of St. Louis and of his brother, Charles of Anjou, King of the Two Sicilies, rather than in furtherance of the general interests of France, were terminated in 1291 by a treaty concluded at Tarascon between the belligerents, and have remained without historical importance.

The Flemish were the people with whom Philip the Handsome engaged in and kept up, during the whole of his reign, with frequent alternations of defeat and success, a really serious war.  In the thirteenth century, Flanders was the most populous and the richest country in Europe.  She owed the fact to the briskness of her manufacturing and commercial undertakings, not only amongst her neighbors, but throughout Southern and Eastern Europe, in Italy, in Spain, in Sweden, in Norway, in Hungary, in Russia, and even as far as Constantinople, where, as we have seen, Baldwin I., Count of Flanders, became, in 1204, Latin Emperor of the East.  Cloth, and all manner of woollen stuffs, were the principal articles of Flemish production, and it was chiefly from England that Flanders drew her supply of Wool, the raw material of her industry.  Thence arose between the two countries commercial relations which could not fail to acquire political importance.  As early as the middle of the twelfth century, several Flemish towns formed a society for founding in England a commercial exchange, which obtained great privileges, and, under the name of the Flemish hanse of London, reached rapid development.  The merchants of Bruges had taken the initiative in it; but soon all the towns of Flanders—­and Flanders was covered with towns—­Ghent, Lille, Ypres, Courtrai, Furnes, Alost, St. Omer, and Douai, entered the confederation, and made unity as well as extension of liberties in respect of Flemish commerce the object of their joint efforts.  Their prosperity became celebrated; and its celebrity gave it increase.  It was a burgher of Bruges who was governor of the hanse of London, and he was called the Count of the Hanse.  The fair of Bruges, held in the month of May, brought together traders from the whole world.  “Thither came for exchange,” says the most modern and most enlightened historian of Flanders (Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove, Histoire de Flandre, t. ii. p. 300), “the produce of the North and the South, the riches collected in the pilgrimages to Novogorod, and those brought over by the caravans from Samarcand and Bagdad, the pitch of Norway and the oils of Andalusia, the furs of Russia and the dates from the Atlas, the metals of Hungary and Bohemia, the figs of Granada, the honey of Portugal, the wax of Morocco, and the spice of Egypt; whereby, says an ancient manuscript,