rawn in the defence of all that was sacred. The
entire body of nobility would have rushed if it could to the Holy Land.
Poor barons sold or mortgaged their lands and their castles, and the
Third Estate grew rich, and the free cities still freer, upon the
necessities of the hour. But all classes, from king to serf, were for
the first time moved by a common sentiment; and not alone France, but
the choicest and best of Europe was poured in one great volume of
passionate zeal into those successive waves which eight times inundated
Palestine. Private interests sacrificed or forgotten, life, treasure,
all eagerly given, for what? That a small bit of territory a thousand
miles distant be torn from profaning infidels, because it was the
birthplace of a religion these champions failed to comprehend; a
religion worn upon their battle-flags but not in their hearts.

The second Crusade, 1147, was led by Conrad, Emperor of Germany, and
Louis VII. of France. The profligate conduct of Queen Eleanor, who
accompanied her royal consort, led to serious political conditions.
Louis appealed to the pope, who consented to the divorce he desired.
This proved simply an exchange of thrones for the fascinating Eleanor.
Henry II. of England, already the possessor of immense estates in
France, inherited from his father, realized that with Aquitaine, Queen
Eleanor's dowry, added to his own, and these again to Normandy, a
marriage with the divorced wife of his rival would make him possessor
of more than three times the size of the domain controlled by the
French king.

The marriage was solemnized in 1152, and France saw her war with the
feudal barons overshadowed by the fight for her very life with England,
who had fastened this tremendous grasp upon her kingdom.

The first truly great Capetian king came with this emergency. Philip
Augustus, son of Louis VII., in the year 1180, when only fifteen years
of age, seized the reins with the hand of a born ruler. Before he was
twenty-one he had broken up a combination of feudal barons against him.
Then he turned to England. Queen Eleanor and her sons were conspiring
against Henry II. So he made friends with them. The palace on the
island in the Seine was an asylum where John and Richard might plot
against their father. And when a third Crusade was planned, 1189, it
had as leaders Philip Augustus of France, Richard I., who had just
succeeded his father, Henry II., as King of England, and Barbaro