onal protection, opened up trade with foreign lands,
beautified Paris and France. He may, under the cloak of religion, have
permitted unjustifiable cruelties against the most innocent, the most
gifted province in Europe, in order to secure access to the sea for
France. But he left the _communes_ richer and happier, his kingdom
freer from local tyrannies, transformed from a pandemonium of
struggling knights and barons into the nearest approach yet realized to
a modern state.

CHAPTER VIII.

If the Crusades had strengthened the power of the Church, they had at
the same time brought about an expansion of thought which was
undermining it. Men were beginning to think, to inquire, and then to
doubt. How could sensuality and vice at Rome be reconciled with a
divine infallibility? If the ballad-poetry of Provence satirized the
lives and manners of the priests, was it not dealing with what was true?

During the reign of Philip's father, a pale studious youth was pacing
the cloisters on the banks of the Seine, by the side of Notre Dame. He
was thinking upon these things. And "as he mused the fire burned."
This was Abelard. The intellectual awakening brought about by the
lectures of this most learned and accomplished man of his time produced
an epoch. He spoke to his disciples in the open air, as no building
could hold the thousands who hung upon his lips. This movement became
localized; a faubourg of students was created with their multiform
activities. It became a quarter by itself--a noisy, turbulent,
agitated quarter--where the only luxury enjoyed was an expanding
thought, and where Latin was the spoken language. And so it happened
that the _Quartier Latin_ came into existence.

But while the place remains, the man quickly passed off the scene. He
was silenced, his teachings condemned by a Church council at Soissons,
and he immured for life in the Monastery of Cluny, to be treasured in
the heart of humanity as a martyr to truth, and as the lover of Eloise,
in that sad romance of the twelfth century.

After a brief reign of three years Louis VIII., son and successor of
Philip, was dead, and Louis IX., under the regency of his mother,
"Blanche of Castile," was proclaimed king. The same family, which
later gave Isabella to Spain, also bestowed upon France this wise,
intrepid woman at a critical time.

With a boy of eleven and a woman of thirty-eight years upon the throne,
the time seemed propitious for