pense. He required that the crusade should be preached anew throughout all France, with the express mention, that the indulgences should be fully equal to those which might be gained by the crusade to the Holy Land. He required, at the same time, that those who would not follow him, from devotion, should be obliged to do it in the fulfilment of their feudal duties, as if the kingdom were subject to a foreign invasion; for no invasion, said he, is more fearful, than that of heresy. Consequently, he demanded that all the French barons who refused, on this occasion, to accomplish the service of their fief, should be excommunicated, and their lands put under an interdict. To be more sure of the direction of these ecclesiastical thunders, he demanded that the archbishop of Bourges should be assigned him as cardinal legate, with full powers over Albigeois. He required the pope, by letters patent, to deprive, for ever, the count of Toulouse, the viscount of Carcassonne, and of Beziers, and all those who should be allied to them, or should make war in concert with them, of all the fiefs they might have in the kingdom of France, and to invest, with them, for ever, the king and his descendants: lastly, he required that, in order to finish this conquest, the church should guarantee to him, for ten years, the truce then existing with the king of England, and should, during the same time, pay him sixty thousand livres of Paris each year; de

claring, that if all these conditions were not accepted, he should consider himself under no obligation to pass into Albigeois. The popes have, in general, preferred the European crusades, which tended directly to extend their authority, to those of the Holy Land, which had rather augmented than diminished the independence of the human mind. Nevertheless, they could not set themselves in open opposition to the opinion of Christendom; and besides, they frequently shared the fanaticism which they had tended to excite. At the very moment when Honorius III received the propositions of Louis VIII, he had well-founded hopes of repairing, by a new crusade, those disasters of the Holy Land which had so recently tarnished the glory of his pontificate. The emperor Frederic II had been engaged to Yolande of Jerusalem, daughter of Jean de Brienne, and the kingdom of Judea had been promised for her portion. Frederic, who was sovereign not only of Germany and Upper Italy, but of Sicily and Calabria, could, with more ease than any other European prince, transport the crusaders from his own ports to that of Saint Jean d'Acre. He had embraced with ardour the project of conquering Syria, to add it to his other possessions; and on the 5th of March had written to the pope, from Catena, a long letter, both to give him an account

9 Petitio ad Papam pro reg. Preuves de l'Hist. de Languedoc, No. 155, p. 292.

of his preparations, and to engage him to remove the obstacles which the situation of France and England interposed to the renewal of the sacred war. "The king of Jerusalem," said Frederic, “has recently written to us from Germany, that he was going to quit that country, seeing that he had there advanced but little the interests of the Holy Land. In truth, the missionaries who preach the cross there are so slandered by every one, both because they are men of the lowest rank, and because they have no authority to grant indulgences, that nobody will listen to them. Other letters, that we have received from different parts of the world, and from the highest and most powerful personages, state, that we are accused, as well as the church, of proceeding with indifference in that affair. The grandees of France and England, as we have been informed by the king of Jerusalem, do not appear desirous of taking the cross, unless a long truce be concluded between the two kingdoms, and they are assured of going and coming in peace. Many of the most powerful amongst those that have taken the cross, even pretend that they have dispensations from you from going to the Holy Land.”1

Honorius III had already given his assent to the propositions of Louis VIII, and the prelates who were his ambassadors, had returned to France, when the pope received the letter of

1 Epist. Frederici II, in Raynaldi Ann. Eccles. 1224, § iv-ix, p. 337 seq.

Frederic II. He could not doubt that the preachers of the crusade in Albigeois were those who had traduced the characters of the vendors of indulgences, and that the persons whose service in the Holy Land he was reproached for having dispensed with, were such as he had encouraged to convert their vows into an expedition of forty days on the banks of the Garonne. How could he, without dishonouring himself, take this moment for publishing, that such a short campaign, without expense, difficulty, or danger, was a work as meritorious as the crusade which the Emperor was preparing to lead against the enemies of Christianity? The extent of the preparations that Louis was making, for the war against the Albigenses, sufficiently showed, that he would not suffer a single Frenchman to pass to the Holy Land, if that war continued. Honorius therefore dispatched the cardinal bishop of Porto, to Louis, recommending him to use the greatest diligence, to communicate the Emperor's letter, to withdraw the consent he had given to their treaty, and to inform him that the count of Toulouse, terrified at the preparations of the king of France, had consented to submit, entirely, to the church, by purging his province of heretics, according to the mode which the mercy of the inquisition had adopted. The good of the Holy Land, added pope, demanded, that he should be contented with these guarantees, and that he should grant

the

peace to Raymond VII in the hope that he would henceforth act with equal vigour and sincerity.

3

Louis VIII thought that he had made himself sure of all the support of the church; he had already written to those communes whose assistance he reckoned most upon, to announce to them that he would march with his army three weeks after Easter, and requiring them to support him vigorously. He was, therefore, exceedingly enraged, when he saw himself thus abandoned by the pope; he wrote to him with much ill humour, and having in his letter recapitulated all that he had done already at the persuasion of the church, he finished with these words; "We have replied to the cardinal bishop of Porto that since the lord pope would not, at present, attend to our reasonable demands, we considered ourselves discharged from the burden of this business, and we have protested as much publicly, before all the prelates and barons of France."

Raymond VII endeavoured to profit by these favourable circumstances, to make his peace with the church. He was earnestly supported at Rome by the ambassadors of the king of England; and had friends in the college of cardinals, who advised him to pursue his advantages in arms, whilst he negociated with the pope. Whilst, therefore,

5

2 Honorii III epist. apud Duchesne, tom. v. No. xvii, p. 895.

3 Epist. Lud. VIII Narbonnensibus Preuves de l'histoire de Languedoc, No. cliii, p. 291.

4 Idem. § clv, p. 294.

5 Epistola episcop. Lichfieldens. Rymer acta publica tom. i, p. 271.