‘He had found France a small realm hedged in by mighty rivals. When he began his reign but a very small portion of the French-speaking people owned his sway. As suzerain his power was derided. Even as immediate lord he was defied and set at nought. But when he died the whole face of France was changed. The King of the Franks was undisputedly the king of by far the greater part of the land, and the internal strength of his government had advanced as rapidly and as securely as the external power.’
Such was the change in France itself, but we can estimate also to-day, what no contemporary of Philip Augustus could have realized, the effect of that change on Europe, when France from a collection of feudal fiefs stood forth at last a nation in the modern sense, ready to take her place as a leader amongst her more backward neighbours.
_Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. 368-73._
Louis VII of France 1137-47 Henry II of England 1154-89 Philip II of France 1180-1223 John, King of England 1199-1216 Battle of Bouvines 1214
When the Emperor Henry IV crossed the ice-bound Alps on his journey of submission to Canossa he was accompanied by a faithful knight, Frederick of Buren, whom he later rewarded for his loyalty with the hand of his daughter and the title Duke of Suabia. Frederick’s son was elected Emperor as Conrad III,[17] the first of the imperial line of Hohenstaufen that was destined to carry on through several generations the war between Empire and Papacy.
The Hohenstaufen received their name from a hill on which stood one of Frederick of Buren’s strongest castles, but they were also called ‘Waiblingen’ after a town in their possession; while the House of Bavaria, their chief rivals, was called ‘Welf’ after an early ancestor. The feud of the Waiblingen and the Welfs that convulsed Germany had no less devastating an effect upon Italy, always exposed to influence from beyond the Alps, and the names of the rivals, corrupted on Italian tongues into ‘Ghibellines’ and ‘Guelfs’, became party cries throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
In our last chapter we spoke of French ‘communes’, municipalities that rebelled against their overlords, setting up a government of their own: the same process of emancipation was at work in North Italy only that it was able to act with greater rapidity and success for a time on account of the national tendency towards separation and the vigour of town life.