Louis’s brother, Charles of Anjou, is said to have led him into this fatal attempt, for his own purposes.  Charles, of very different memory, was at this time, by invitation of the pope, occupying the double throne of Naples and Sicily.  And he it was who provoked by his cruelties that frightful outbreak known as the “Sicilian Vespers,” in 1283.

The Crusades had lasted from 1095 to 1270.  The purpose for which they were undertaken had signally failed.  Jerusalem, captured in the first Crusade, was lost in the second, and never recovered.  And so ineffectual had been the expenditure of life, fortune, and enthusiasm that the last Crusade was not even fought in Palestine, but on the shores of North Africa.

But something had been accomplished which none had foreseen:  a result of greater magnitude than territorial possession of the Holy Land.  Through the broadening of men’s views, and the common heritage of a great experience, a group of isolated kingdoms had been drawn into fraternal relations, and a European civilization had commenced.

There had been many surprises.  Close contact had softened prejudices.  The infidel had found that the crusader was something more than the most brutal and stupid of barbarians, as he had supposed; and the crusader, that the profaning infidel was not the monster he expected to find.  In fact, the European discovered that in the Saracen and the Greek they met a civilization much more advanced, more learned, and more polished than their own.  More civilization was brought out of the East than was carried into it by its Christian invaders.  And it was through this strange and disastrous experience that the art and the thought of Europe received its first impulse toward a great future.

During the fifteen years of the reign of Louis’s son, Philip III., France moved on under the momentum received from his father.  But the succeeding reign of Philip IV. was epoch-making.  That imperious, strong-willed son of Saint Louis demanded that the clergy should share the state’s burden by contributing to its revenue.  Pope Boniface VIII., imperious and strong-willed as he, immediately issued a bull, forbidding the clergy to pay, or the officers to receive, such taxes.  The answer to this was a royal edict forbidding the exportation of precious metals (of course including money) from France to Italy, thus cutting off from the pope the large revenue from the Church in France.

The quarrel resolved itself at last into a question of the relative authority of king and pope in the kingdom.  In order to fortify his position, and perhaps to show his contempt for clergy and barons alike, Philip took a step which profoundly affected the future of France.  At a great council summoned to consider these papal claims, he commanded the presence not only of the ecclesiastics and nobles, the two governing estates, but also summoned the representatives of the towns and cities—­the Tiers Etat!  Prelate, baron, and bourgeois for the first time met in a Council of State.