The History of the Renaissance World (43 page)

No taxation without consent, limitation of the king’s power to seize and punish: it was, as the contemporary
Chronicle of Melrose
remarks, “a new state of things . . . in England; such a strange affair as had never been heard.” The
Chronicle
is incredulous: “The body wished to rule the head, and the people desired to be masters over the king,” it marvels. But John had pushed his barons too far, and the defeat at Bouvines had weakened him just enough for them to push back.
⁹

For five months, John put his noblemen off with promises and additional requests for clarification. The twelve-item list grew to forty-nine.
*
By the last week of April 1215, it had become clear that the king was not going to yield. On May 3, the chief barons of England renounced their allegiance to the crown of England. Two weeks later, a group of the rebels seized London on Sunday morning, while most of the population was busy attending Mass, and installed one of their own as the new acting mayor of the city. “They then . . . sent letters throughout England,” says Roger of Wendover, “to those earls, barons, and knights, who appeared to be still faithful to the king . . . and advised them . . . to stand firm and fight against the king for their rights and for peace. . . . [T]he greatest part of these, on receiving the message of the barons, set out to London and joined them, abandoning the king entirely.”
¹⁰

With the party of the barons growing daily, John decided to negotiate. He was short on money, suffering from a severe attack of gout, and had no intention of keeping to any promise made under duress in any case. He sent word to the rebel barons by way of William Marshal, now close to seventy and in his forty-fifth year of service to the English throne, that he would meet them at a time and place of their choosing.

They chose a field lying between Staines and Windsor: Runnymede, a water meadow on the Thames. On June 15, the “whole nobility of England . . . in numbers not to be computed” assembled on one side of the field; John, carried on a litter because of the severity of his gout, and his few remaining supporters on the other. “At length,” Roger of Wendover writes, “king John, seeing that he was inferior in strength to the barons, without raising any difficulty, granted the underwritten laws and liberties, and confirmed them by his charter.”
¹¹

The Magna Carta, the Great Charter confirmed by John at Runnymede, bears the date June 15, 1215; but in fact John and the barons negotiated with each other for most of the week, amending and adding to the articles before the charter was finally sworn out. In its final form, the Magna Carta provided the barons with multiple layers of protection against the king’s whimsy; it protected their goods, their lands, and their inheritances against John’s arbitrary decrees; it rested the final decision over fines and scutages in the “common counsel of our realm,” a gathering of churchmen, earls, and barons (known, since William the Conqueror, as the Curia Regis, and now invested with additional powers). “No one,” read Article 39,

shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined, nor will we go or send against him, except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.
¹²

To make sure that the charter was observed, the Magna Carta also appointed a committee of twenty-five barons who had the power to confiscate royal castles, lands, and possessions, should John refuse to abide by its terms.
*

This was a massive shift in authority, but John signed it; in large part, because he’d already laid plans in place to get out of it. Before coming to Runnymede, he had written to Innocent III, pointing out that should the barons deprive John of kingly authority, they would also be depriving Innocent III—the papal overlord of England, to whom John had sworn loyalty as a vassal—of his spiritual authority. Innocent III, ever mindful of his own power, reacted as John had hoped. On August 24, he announced that the Magna Carta was annulled. “On behalf of Almighty God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” he wrote to England, “. . . and by our own authority . . . we utterly reject and condemn this settlement, and under threat of excommunication we order that the king should not dare to observe it.”
¹³

John, who had spent five perfectly happy years living under papal condemnation, at once piously decided to obey God rather than man. He had retreated, after Runnymede, to the Isle of Wight. Armed with papal permission, he emerged to gather an army of foreign soldiers: mercenaries, men from Aquitaine, papal loyalists. The run-up to the Magna Carta had been bloodless; even the capture of London had been achieved without battle. Now war began.
¹⁴

The Magna Carta had not been intended to establish a democracy; and from the beginning of the fighting, the barons hoped not to do away with the king but to find a better one. They now decided, Roger of Wendover writes, “to choose some powerful man as king, by whose means they could be restored to their possessions and former liberties; and . . . they unanimously determined to appoint Louis, son of Philip the French king, as their ruler, and to raise him to the throne of England.”
¹⁵

Philip, once again seizing the chance to do his enemy a disservice, agreed to this plan. On May 21, 1216, Louis—aged twenty-nine, married to Princess Blanche of Castile—landed in England. “As soon as Louis arrived in England,” the
Chronicle of Melrose
records, “William Longsword, brother of the king of England, and many others, deserted the king and passed over to Louis.” He marched to London unopposed; John, realizing that few of his French soldiers would fight against their own prince, had retreated to Canterbury. The barons welcomed Louis to the city, and proclaimed him king of England there.
¹⁶

In the next months, Louis fought his way through the south of England, laying siege to both Dover and Windsor, driving John back towards the Welsh border. Both armies were given to “rapine and robbery, and . . . the destruction of property,” and anarchy once again swallowed the countryside. Like the war between Stephen and Matilda, the Barons’ War seemed poised to drag on indefinitely. But in early October, John came down with a fever after a difficult journey. “His sickness was increased by his pernicious gluttony,” Roger of Wendover writes, “for that night he surfeited himself with peaches and drinking new cider.” Like Stephen, seventy-five years before, John had come down with dysentery. He died on October 18, 1216, aged forty-nine; he had been king of England for eighteen and a half years.
¹⁷

Prince Louis now assumed that England would fall complete into his hands. But with John gone, William Marshal—regent for John’s nine-year-old son, Henry—swore that young Henry would cleave to the Magna Carta. Meanwhile, the barons had been rethinking their plan. Louis’s French troops had not made themselves popular. They had treated the barons with arrogant disdain, and Louis himself had been quick to claim for his own personal possession the castles and lands he had seized in his war against John. Slowly, the barons began to trickle back over to the house of Plantagenet.

By the following summer, it had become clear to Louis that his hopes of an English crown were doomed. In September, he gave up and went home (“in lasting ignominy,” Roger of Wendover says). The ignominy was, possibly, made more bearable by the terms of his departure; to hasten him on his way, William Marshal handed over ten thousand silver marks from the royal treasury.
¹⁸

*
Historians differ over the size of the armies that fought at Bouvines; estimates range from 20,000 to 80,000 or more.

*
The original twelve-item list is usually known as “The Unknown Charter,” while the forty-nine items are known as “The Articles of the Barons.”

*
Magna Carta is one of the most exhaustively studied documents in Western literature and cannot be treated thoroughly in a history of this breadth. J. C. Holt’s
Magna Carta
(Cambridge University Press, 1965) is the best starting place for the general reader; the Unknown Charter, the Articles of the Barons, and the Magna Carta can all be read in full in
English Historical Documents
, vol. 3,
1189–1327
, ed. Harry Rothwell (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1975);
1215: The Year of Magna Carta
, by Danny Danziger and John Gillingham (Touchstone, 2005), gives a detailed account of the events surrounding Runnymede. An extensive bibliography of the best-regarded studies can be found in Michael Van Cleave Alexander,
Three Crises in Early English History
(University Press of America, 1998), pp. 114–120.

Chapter Thirty-Six

The Birth of the Inquisition

Between 1215 and 1229,
the Fourth Lateran Council calls for crusade,
the Albigensian Wars end,
the Franciscan and Dominican orders are recognized,
and the Council of Toulouse authorizes a new form of inquiry

T
HROUGHOUT
1215, priests and bishops had been making their way to Rome: singly, in pairs, in bands, arriving at the great city and taking up temporary lodgings. The newly appointed Latin patriarch of Constantinople was among them. So were the senior churchmen from Acre and the other Crusader cities in the east. Ambassadors from the kings of France, England, Germany, and a score of other sovereigns joined them. Innocent III had summoned a church council, and the entire Western world had responded.

On November 11, the Fourth Lateran Council began.
*
There were, says Roger of Wendover, more than eight hundred abbots and priors in attendance, and over four hundred bishops and archbishops. Dominic de Guzman, who had tried fruitlessly to convert the Cathars by preaching to them a decade earlier, was present. So, in all likelihood, was an obscure Italian monk from Assisi named Francis; he had gathered together a small band of devout men who had followed his call to strictly observe Matthew 19:21 (“If you will be perfect, go, sell all that you have, and give it to the poor”), and five years earlier Innocent III had given him permission to establish his own monastic order. They called themselves the Lesser Brothers, or Minor Friars; eventually they were nicknamed the Franciscans, after their founder.
¹

Innocent III intended for the Fourth Lateran Council—the greatest church assembly in a century—to address matters of doctrine and heresy. But the exiled Raymond of Toulouse was also present, along with his son and a handful of his supporters; he had come to plead for the restoration of his lands, currently in the hands of Simon de Montfort.

Contemporary accounts suggest that Innocent III was inclined to give Toulouse back to the count; Simon de Montfort had not proved to be a righteous ruler of the conquered lands. “He destroys Catholics just as much as heretics,” Innocent is said to have complained to his legates, “[and] serious complaints and bitter accusations reach me every month.” But the majority of the priests present objected, arguing that Raymond would once again give shelter to heretics. Saving his firepower for doctrinal issues, Innocent III yielded. Simon de Montfort was given permanent dominion over Toulouse, with only Raymond’s family lands in Provence held in reserve for his son.
²

With Toulouse disposed of, the Fourth Lateran Council went about its business, confirming a staggering seventy articles of doctrine (all of them, says Roger of Wendover, were read aloud to the full council, “which seemed agreeable to some and tedious to others”) and issuing, as had almost become routine, a call for yet another crusade to the Holy Land. As far as Innocent was concerned, the Albigensian Crusade was at an end. But the wronged Raymond of Toulouse was not resigned to his exile. Simmering with fury, he left Rome and made his way to Avignon, in Languedoc, where he began to collect an army.
³

Simon de Montfort was, by now, deeply unpopular in southern France, and Raymond had no trouble assembling a sizable band of supporters. He occupied the lands east of the Rhone without difficulty, and more than one town opened its gates to him willingly. Simon de Montfort, alarmed, hired additional knights (“with the promise of high rates of pay,” says Pierre des Vaux de Cernay) from France. But Raymond advanced steadily; and Montfort was fighting near the Rhone when the city of Toulouse itself revolted against him and sent Raymond an invitation to reenter as count and lord. Raymond marched into Toulouse in triumph on October 1, 1217.
⁴