แ VII. Prince of Salerno, son of Charles, commanded there, and СНАР. was under express orders from his father not to risk an engagement till he should arrive from Provence with a fresh fleet of fifty sail. Young Charles of Salerno, however, could not brook Loria's insults, and sailed from Naples, with all the galleys there, to give battle to the Sicilian admiral. He was unfortunate in his gallant attempt, losing all his galleys, and himself remaining a prisoner. Charles soon after arrived, furious equally at the disaster and at his son's disobedience. Why did he not die?" exclaimed the father, shocked at the advantage to the enemy of holding his son a captive. His wish was well nigh fulfilled by the Messinese, who proposed nothing less than putting the Prince of Salerno to death, in revenge for that of Conradin. But the daughter of Manfred, Constance, Queen of Aragon, saved the prince and brought him off to Barcelona. Charles, inflamed by permanent rage, brought fleet and army once more to the straits, and laid siege to Reggio, which, though on the opposite coast, the Messinese had taken and held. Unsuccessful in this as in his attack of Messina, Charles was obliged to retire to Brindisi and from thence, suffering with fever, to Foggia. Here this most restless and ambitious prince expired, in January 1284. The heir to his possessions being at the time a prisoner in the hands of his enemies, Charles, with his dying breath, besought Philip the Hardy to be the guardian and also the ransomer and protector of the heir of Anjou. Philip was eager not only to respond to the dying wish of his uncle, but to signalise his reign by the conquest of a kingdom. His preparations were complete. Twenty thousand knights awaited him at Toulouse, in the spring of 1285, with four times that number of infantry and followers. On this occasion the French did not attack Aragon through Navarre. Their alliance with the brother of Don Pedro, who was King of Majorca VII. CHAP. and Count of Roussillon, not only afforded them a more easy ingress to Spain, but enabled them to be accompanied by their fleet. The little fortress of Elme, at the foot of the Pyrenees, offered the first resistance, and the legate, who commanded one of the French divisions, instantly laid siege to it. Those within offered to surrender, if not released within a few days; but the legate would neither grant delay nor show mercy. He ordered the assault, which was successful, and commanded that no quarter should be shown to those in arms for their country against the orders of the Church. Peter of Aragon was totally without those resources for defending his country that Philip had at his disposal for invading it. The latter had wealth, numbers, the unanimous and zealous support of his subjects, who now began to attack all foreigners-English, Spanish, or Italian — with an exclusively national spirit. The Spaniards had not yet awakened to such sentiment, and the French king had, moreover, Don Pedro's brother, with the province of Navarre, and the King of Castille, on his side. Neither was the monarch of Aragon upheld by his subjects, who, like the English of that day, when Edward besought them to help him in war against the French, replied by insisting on greater liberties and immunities from taxation. The legate summoned Peter to submit to his rival, to whom the Pope had given his kingdom. "Such modes of giving and taking a crown cost little," said Peter; "my ancestors purchased theirs with their blood, whoever would take it from me must pay the same price." Peter with a small force kept post on one of the heights of the Pyrenees, and defied the French to pass; nor could they have done so had not a knight of Roussillon betrayed a secret path over the mountains. By it the French descended into the plain below, and Peter being obliged to withdraw, they without opposition laid siege to the strong town of Gerona. The menacing presence VII. of the French then roused the Aragonese and Catalo- CHAP. nians to resistance; at the king's desire they formed guerilla bands, while he fortified Barcelona. In one fierce encounter the king of Aragon was surrounded by his foes, and after a chivalrous defence escaped, not without a wound of extreme severity. The French say it was the cause of his death. Pedro, however, lived long enough to see himself a complete victor. The Sicilian fleet arrived under Loria, attacked and destroyed all the French galleys in the harbour of Rosas, and Philip with his army was reduced to what supplies the land and its roads could furnish. Provisions began to fail, and pestilence, the usual accompaniment of those large military expeditions in that age, began to appear. Gerona could hold out no longer; after supporting three months' siege it surrendered, but it was to victors as weak and as distressed as the vanquished. The French king hastily flung a garrison into Gerona, and commanded a retreat towards the Pyrenees. It was disastrous, the retiring foes harassed by the Spanish guerillas, and unable from sickness to resist. Peter, it is said, might have distressed the French and disputed the repossession of the Pyrenees, for Aragon and Catalonia had all now rallied to him. But he allowed their 4000 knights, the remainder of 20,000, to go unmolested through the mountain defiles, escorting King Philip extended in a litter. According to the French, it was the timely arrival of the Count of Narbonne with fresh troops, and not any forbearance of Pedro's, that enabled Philip to get to the north of the Pyrenees. The king reached Perpignan, his illness increasing, and he expired in this town on the 5th of October, 1285. Almost immediately afterwards Gerona surrendered to the King of Aragon, who thus reversed the only result of the war. Peter lived to see but not enjoy his victory. He was about to sail with Loria for the conquest of Majorca, when a sudden fever carried him off. Thus CHAP. were withdrawn together from the scene the chief actors in the stirring drama: Charles and Peter, Philip and the Pope. And the French monarchy, in its first great and simultaneous attempts to overrun the Alps and the Pyrenees, and subject the principal provinces of the two peninsulas, encountered the same fortune, which ever after attended the first results of similar enterprises. Philip the Hardy left four children; his successor, Philip, and Charles, Count of Valois (the hat king of Aragon) sons of Isabella. By Maria of Brabant he left Louis Count of Evreux, Margaret, afterwards queen of Edward the First, and Blanche, Duchess of Austria. The government of Philip the Hardy is chiefly remarkable for initiating nothing. It was St. Louis who inaugurated the policy of supporting Charles of Anjou, and that led of necessity to the Aragonese war. Philip maintained the same friendly relations with England that St. Louis had done. He and Edward were on the best of terms as their mutual letters testify, each yielding to the other whatever was required to maintain peace if not alliance. There is even some identity to be remarked in the legislative efforts of the two monarchs. Both persecuted the Jews, both passed statutes of mortmain about the same time, both, in summoning parliaments, called the several orders apart; both granted important rights and privileges to the middle classes, with the same view of extracting money from them more easily than from the aristocracy. The liberties which Philip granted or sanctioned to the people of Rouen will be found amongst his ordonnances of 1278. In this respect, as in the consulting of parliament, Philip was more liberal than his sire. St. Louis knew how to attach to him a number of men of all ranks and talents, and to distribute his favours equally. Knights like Joinville, lawyers like Pierre des Fontaines, churchmen like St. Thomas Aquifound their place in the good king's intimacy. But nas, VII. Philip, quamvis illiteratus, as Nangis described him, was CHAP. not fond of the learned or the talented. In the first years of his reign he made a confident of Pierre de la Brosse, who had been a chamberlain of his father's. Philip advanced him to high dignities, and endowed him with rich fiefs; his brother, too, he made a bishop. De La Brosse was unfortunate enough to make an enemy of Queen Maria of Brabant, a quarrel that proved fatal to him. The circumstances are too characteristic of the times not to be related. Louis, eldest son of King Philip by his first wife, Isabel of Aragon, having died rather suddenly, his death was attributed to poison. Peter de la Brosse did not shrink from insinuating that the queen was guilty of this act, and that she was capable of inflicting the same fate upon all the king's children by Isabel. The son of St. Louis, disturbed by such a rumour, did not recur to any of his good father's modes of investigating crime. He resolved to consult a soothsayer. Two or three persons were mentioned to him as possessing the gift of what in our day has been called clairvoyance. A kind of beguine or begging nun, of Nivelle in Flanders, was fixed on as having most reputation. And Philip sent the Abbot of St. Denis to question her. Whatever the abbot heard in reply, he considered it too serious to repeat. He therefore declined speaking, on the plea that what he had heard was under the secret of the confessional. The king, piqued and angered, sent other messengers, who at once told that they came from the King of France. The beguine accordingly gave the best possible character of the queen. Singular to say, we learn all this from the Chronicle of St. Denis, a history of the time written in that orthodox and enlightened monastery. The verdict of the beguine satisfied Philip, and abated much of his trust and friendship for De la Brosse. Some time was allowed to elapse, when the grandees, who were bent on |