few days the handful of towns-folk in Anagni were able to rise against them, expel them from the place and rescue the aged Pope. He had been struck—beaten, say not wholly reliable authorities—and so insulted that rage and shame drove him mad, and he died.

Not a sword in all Europe leaped from its scabbard to avenge the martyr. Religious men might shudder at the sacrilege, but the next Pope, venturing to take up Boniface's quarrel, died within a few months under strong probabilities of poison; and the next Pope, Clement V, became the obedient servant of the French King. He even removed the seat of papal authority from Rome to Avignon in France, and there for seventy years the popes remained. The breakdown of the whole temporal power of the Church was sudden, terrible, complete.

INCREASING POWER OF FRANCE

Following up his religious successes, Philip the Fair attacked the mighty knights of the Temple, the most powerful of the religious orders of knighthood which had fought the Saracens in Jerusalem. The Templars, having found their warfare hopeless, had abandoned the Holy Land and had dwelt for a generation inglorious in the West. Philip suddenly seized the leading members of the order, accused it of hideous crimes, and confiscated all its vast wealth and hundreds of strong castles throughout France. He secured from his French Pope approval of the extermination of the entire order and the torture and execution of its chiefs. Whether the charges against them were true or not, their helplessness in the grip of the King shows clearly the low ebb to which knighthood had fallen, and the rising power of the monarchs. The day of feudalism was past.2

We may read yet other signs of the age in the career of this cruel, crafty King. To strengthen himself in his struggle against the Pope, he called, in 1302, an assembly or "states-general" of his people; and, following the example already established in England, he gave a voice in this assembly to the "Third Estate," the common folk or "citizens," as well as to the nobles and the clergy. So even in France we find the people acquiring power, though as yet this Third Estate speaks with but a timid and subservient voice, requiring to be much encouraged by its money-asking sovereigns, who little dreamed it would one day be strong enough to demand a reckoning of all its tyrant overlords.3

Another event to be noted in this same year of 1302 took place farther northward in King Philip's domains. The Flemish cities Ghent, Liège, and Bruges had grown to be the great centres of the commercial world, so wealthy and so populous that they outranked Paris. The sturdy Flemish burghers had not always been subject to France—else they had been less well to-do. They regarded Philip's exactions as intolerable, and rebelled. Against them marched the royal army of iron-clad knights; and the desperate citizens, meeting these with no better defence than stout leather jerkins, led them into a trap. At the battle of Courtrai the knights charged into an unsuspected ditch, and as they fell the burghers with huge clubs beat out such brains as they could find within the helmets. It was subtlety against stupidity, the merchant's shrewdness asserting itself along new lines. King Philip had to create for himself a fresh nobility to replenish his depleted stock.4

The fact that there is so much to pause on in Philip's reign will in itself suggest the truth, that France had grown the most important state in Europe. This, however, was due less to French strength than to the weakness of the empire, where rival rulers were being constantly elected and wasting their strength against one another. If Courtrai had given the first hint that these iron-clad knights were not invincible in war, it was soon followed by another. The Swiss peasants formed among themselves a league to resist oppression. This took definite shape in 1308 when they rebelled openly against their Hapsburg overlords.5 The Hapsburg duke of the moment was one of two rival claimants for the title of emperor, and was much too busy to attend personally to the chastisement of these presumptuous boors. The army which he sent to do the work for him was met by the Swiss at Morgarten, among their mountain passes, overwhelmed with rocks, and then put to flight by one fierce charge of the unarmored peasants. It took the Austrians seventy years to forget that lesson, and when a later generation sent a second army into the mountains it was overthrown at Sempach. Swiss liberty was established on an unarguable basis.6

A similar tale might be told of Bannockburn, where, under Bruce, the Scotch common folk regained their freedom from the English.7 Courtrai, Morgarten, Bannockburn! Clearly a new force was growing up over all Europe, and a new spirit among men. Knighthood, which had lost its power over kings, seemed like to lose its military repute as well.

The development of the age was, of course, most rapid in Italy, where democracy had first asserted itself. In its train came intellectual ability, and by the middle of the fourteenth century Italy was in the full swing of the intellectual renaissance.8 In 1341 Petrarch, recognized by all his contemporary countrymen as their leading scholar and poet, was crowned with a laurel wreath on the steps of the Capitol in Rome. This was the formal assertion by the age of its admiration for intellectual worth. To Petrarch is ascribed the earliest recognition of the beauty of nature. He has been called the first modern man. In reading his works we feel at last that we speak with one of our own, with a friend who understands.9

THE PERIOD OF DISASTER

Unfortunately, however, the democracy of Italy proved too intense, too frenzied and unbalanced. Rienzi established a republic in Rome and talked of the restoration of the city's ancient rule. But he governed like a madman or an inflated fool, and was slain in a riot of the streets.10 Scarce one of the famous cities succeeded in retaining its republican form. Milan became a duchy. Florence fell under the sway of the Medici. In Venice a few rich families seized all authority, and while the fame and territory of the republic were extended, its dogeship became a mere