CHARLEMAGNE [CHARLES THE GREAT] Roman emperor, and king of the Franks, was the elder son of Pippin the Short, king of the Franks, and Bertha, or Bertrada, daughter of Charibert, count of Laon. The place of his birth is unknown and its date uncertain, although some authorities give it as the 2nd of April 742; doubts have been cast upon his legitimacy, and it is just possible that the marriage of Pippin and Bertha took place subsequent to the birth of their elder son. When Pippin was crowned king of the Franks at St Denis on the 28th of July 754 by Pope Stephen II, Charles, and his brother Carloman were anointed by the pope as a sign of their kingly rank. The rough surroundings of the Frankish court were unfavourable to the acquisition of learning, and Charles grew up almost ignorant of letters, but hardy in body and skilled in the use of weapons.

In 761 he accompanied his father on a campaign in Aquitaine, and in 763 undertook the government of several counties. In 768 Pippin divided his dominions between his two sons, and on his death soon afterwards Charles became the ruler of the northern portion of the Frankish kingdom, and was crowned at Noyon on the 9th of October 768. Bad feeling had existed for some time between Charles and Carloman, and when Charles early in 769 was called upon to suppress a rising in Aquitaine, his brother refused to afford him any assistance. This rebellion, however, was easily crushed, its leader, the Aquitainian duke Hunold, was made prisoner, and his territory more closely attached to the Frankish kingdom. About this time Bertha, having effected a temporary reconciliation between her sons, overcame the repugnance with which Pope Stephen III regarded an alliance between Frank and Lombard, and brought about a marriage between Charles and a daughter of Desiderius, king of the Lombards. Charles had previously contracted a union, probably of an irregular nature, with a Frankish lady named Himiltrude, who had borne him a son Pippin, the "Hunchback." The peace with the Lombards, in which the Bavarians as allies of Desiderius joined, was, however, soon broken. Charles thereupon repudiated his Lombard wife (Bertha or Desiderata) and married in 771 a princess of the Alamanni named Hildegarde. Carloman died in December 771, and Charles was at once recognized at Corbeny as sole king of the Franks. Carloman's widow Gerberga had fled to the protection of the Lombard king, who espoused her cause and requested the new pope, Adrian I, to recognize her two sons as the lawful Frankish kings. Adrian, between whom and the Lombards other causes of quarrel existed, refused to assent to this demand, and when Desiderius invaded the papal territories he appealed to the Frankish king for help. Charles, who was at the moment engaged in his first Saxon campaign, expostulated with Desiderius; but when such mild measures proved useless he led his forces across the Alps in 773. Gerberga and her children were delivered up and disappear from history; the siege of Pavia was undertaken; and at Easter 774 the king left the seat of war and visited Rome, where he was received with great respect.

During his stay in the city Charles renewed the donation which his father Pippin had made to the papacy in 754 or 756. This transaction has given rise to much discussion as to its trustworthiness and the extent of its operation. Our only authority, a passage in the Liber Pontificalis, describes the gift as including the whole of Italy and Corsica, except the lands north of the Po, Calabria and the city of Naples. The vast extent of this donation, which, moreover, included territories not owning Charles's authority, and the fact that the king did not execute, or apparently attempt to execute, its provisions, has caused many scholars to look upon the passage as a forgery; but the better opinion would appear to be that it is genuine, or at least has a genuine basis. Various explanations have been suggested. The area of the grant may have been enlarged by later interpolations; or it may have dealt with property rather than with sovereignty, and have only referred to estates claimed by the pope in the territories named; or it is possible that Charles may have actually intended to establish an extensive papal kingdom in Italy, but was released from his promise by Adrian when the pope saw no chance of its fulfilment. Another supposition is that the author of the Liber Pontificalis gives the papal interpretation of a grant that had been expressed by Pippin in ambiguous terms; and this view is supported by the history of the subsequent controversy between king and pope.

Returning to the scene of hostilities, Charles witnessed the capitulation of Pavia in June 774, and the capture of Desiderius, who was sent into a monastery. He now took the title "king of the Lombards," to which he added the dignity of "Patrician of the Romans," which had been granted to his father. Adalgis, the son of Desiderius, who was residing at Constantinople, hoped the emperor Leo IV would assist him in recovering his father's kingdom; but a coalition formed for this purpose was ineffectual, and a rising led by his ally Rothgaud, duke of Friuli, was easily crushed by Charles in 776. In 777 the king was visited at Paderborn by three Saracen chiefs who implored his aid against Abdar-Rahman, the caliph of Cordova, and promised some Spanish cities in return for help. Seizing this opportunity to extend his influence Charles marched into Spain in 778 and took Pampeluna, but meeting with some checks decided to return. As the Frankish forces were defiling through the passes of the Pyrenees they were attacked by the Wascones (probably Basques), and the rearguard of the army was almost annihilated. It was useless to attempt to avenge this disaster, which occurred on the 15th of August 778, for the enemy disappeared as quickly as he came; the incident has passed from the domain of history into that of legend and romance, being associated by tradition with the pass of Roncesvalles. Among the slain was one Hruodland, or Roland, margrave of the Breton march, whose death gave rise to the Chanson de Roland.

Charles now sought to increase his authority in Italy, where Frankish counts were set over various districts, and where Hildebrand, duke of Spoleto, appears to have recognized his overlordship. In 780 he was again in the peninsula, and at Mantua issued an important capitulary which increased the authority of the Lombard bishops, relieved freemen who under stress of famine had sold themselves into servitude, and condemned abuses of the system of vassalage. At the same time commerce was encouraged by the abolition of unauthorized tolls and by an improvement of the coinage; while the sale of arms to hostile peoples, and the trade in Christian slaves were forbidden. Proceeding to Rome, the king appears to have come to some arrangement with Adrian about the donation of 774. At Easter 781, Carloman, his second son by Hildegarde, was renamed Pippin and crowned king of Italy by Pope Adrian, and his youngest son Louis was crowned king of Aquitaine; but no mention was made at the time of his eldest son Charles, who was doubtless intended to be king of the Franks. In 783 the king, having lost his wife Hildegarde, married Fastrada, the daughter of a Frankish count named Radolf; and in the same year his mother Bertha died. The emperor Constantine VI was at this time exhibiting some interest in Italian affairs, and Adalgis the Lombard was still residing at his court; so Charles sought to avert danger from this quarter by consenting in 781 to a marriage between Constantine and his own daughter Rothrude. In 786 the entreaties of the pope and the hostile attitude of Arichis II, duke of Benevento, a son-in-law of Desiderius, called the king again into Italy. Arichis submitted without a struggle, though the basis of Frankish authority in his duchy was far from secure; but in conjunction with Adalgis he sought aid from Constantinople. His plans were ended by his death in 787, and although the empress Irene, the real ruler of the eastern empire, broke off the projected marriage between her son and Rothrude, she appears to have given very little assistance to Adalgis, whose attack on Italy was easily repulsed. During this visit Charles had presented certain towns to Adrian, but an estrangement soon arose between king and pope over the claim of Charles to confirm the election to the archbishopric of Ravenna, and it was accentuated by Adrian's objection to the establishment by Charles of Grimoald III as duke of Benevento, in succession to his father Arichis.

These journeys and campaigns, however, were but interludes in the long and stubborn struggle between Charles and the Saxons, which began in 772 and ended in 804 with the incorporation of Saxony in the Carolingian empire. This contest, in which the king himself took a very active part, brought the Franks into collision with the Wiltzi, a tribe dwelling east of the Elbe, who in 789 was reduced to dependence. A similar sequence of events took place in southern Germany. Tassilo III, duke of the Bavarians, who had on several occasions adopted a line of conduct inconsistent with his allegiance to Charles, was deposed in 788 and his duchy placed under the rule of Gerold, a brother-in-law of Charles, to be governed on the Frankish system. Having thus taken upon himself the control of Bavaria, Charles felt himself responsible for protecting its eastern frontier, which had long been menaced by the Avars, a people inhabiting the region now known as Hungary. He accordingly ravaged their country in 791 at the head of an army containing Saxon, Frisian, Bavarian and Alamannian warriors, which penetrated as far as the Raab; and he spent the following year in Bavaria preparing for a second campaign against them, the conduct of which, however, he was compelled by further trouble in Saxony to entrust to his son king Pippin, and to Eric, margrave of Friuli. These deputies succeeded in 795 and 796 in taking possession of the vast treasures of the Avars, which were distributed by the king with lavish generosity to churches, courtiers and friends. A conspiracy against Charles, which his friend and biographer Einhard alleges was provoked by the cruelties of Queen Fastrada, was suppressed without difficulty in 792, and its leader, the king's illegitimate son Pippin, was confined in a monastery till his death in 811. Fastrada died in August 794, when Charles took for his fourth wife an Alamannian lady named Liutgarde.

The continuous interest taken by the king in ecclesiastical affairs was shown at the synod of Frankfort, over which he presided in 794. It was on his initiative that this synod condemned the heresy of adoptianism and the worship of images, which had been restored in 787 by the second council of Nicaea; and at the same time that council was declared to have been superfluous. This policy caused a further breach with Pope Adrian; but when Adrian died in December 795, his successor, Leo III, in notifying his elevation to the king, sent him the keys of St Peter's grave and the banner of the city, and asked Charles to send an envoy to receive his oath of fidelity. There is no doubt that Leo recognized Charles as sovereign of Rome. He was the first pope to date his acts according to the years of the Frankish monarchy, and a mosaic of the time in the Lateran palace represents St Peter bestowing the banners upon Charles as a token of temporal supremacy, while the coinage issued by the pope bears witness to the same idea. Leo soon had occasion to invoke the aid of his protector. In 799, after he had been attacked and maltreated in the streets of Rome during a procession, he escaped to the king at Paderborn, and Charles sent him back to Italy escorted by some of his most trusted servants. Taking the same journey himself shortly afterwards, the king reached Rome in 800 for the purpose (as he declared) of restoring discipline in the church. His authority was undisputed; and after Leo had cleared himself by an oath of certain charges made against him, Charles restored the pope and banished his leading opponents.

The great event of this visit took place on the succeeding Christmas Day, when Charles on rising from prayer in St Peter's was crowned by Leo and proclaimed emperor and augustus amid the acclamations of the crowd. This act can hardly have been unpremeditated, and some doubt has been cast upon the statement which Einhard attributes to Charles, that he would not have entered the building had he known of the intention of Leo. He accepted the dignity at any rate without demur, and there seems little doubt that the question of assuming, or obtaining, this title had previously been discussed. His policy had been steadily leading up to this position, which was rather the emblem of the power he already held than an extension of the area of his authority. It is probable therefore that Charles either considered the coronation premature, as he was hoping to obtain the assent of the eastern empire to this step, or that, from fear of evils which he foresaw from the claim of the pope to crown the emperor, he wished to crown himself. All the evidence tends to show that it was the time or manner of the act rather than the act itself which aroused his temporary displeasure. Contemporary accounts lay stress upon the fact that as there was then no emperor, Constantinople being under the rule of Irene, it seemed good to Leo and his counsellors and the "rest of the Christian people" to choose Charles, already ruler of Rome, to fill the vacant office. However doubtful such conjectures concerning his intentions may be, it is certain that immediately after his coronation Charles sought to establish friendly relations with Constantinople, and even suggested a marriage between himself and Irene, as he had again become a widower in 800. The deposition and death of the empress foiled this plan; and after a desultory warfare in Italy between the two empires, negotiations were recommenced which in 810 led to an arrangement between Charles and the eastern emperor, Nicephorus I. The death of Nicephorus and the accession of Michael I did not interfere with the relations, and in 812 an embassy from Constantinople arrived at Aix-la-Chapelle, when Charles was acknowledged as emperor, and in return agreed to cede Venice and Dalmatia to Michael.

Increasing years and accumulating responsibilities now caused the emperor to alter somewhat his manner of life. No longer leading his armies in person he entrusted the direction of campaigns in various parts of his empire to his sons and other lieutenants, and from his favourite residence at Aix watched their progress with a keen and sustained interest. In 802 he ordered that a new oath of fidelity to him as emperor should be taken by all his subjects over twelve years of age. In 804 he was visited by Pope Leo, who returned to Rome laden with gifts. Before his coronation as emperor, Charles had entered into communications with the caliph of Bagdad, Harun-al-Rashid, probably in order to protect the eastern Christians, and in 801 he had received an embassy and presents from Harun. In the same year the patriarch of Jerusalem sent him the keys of the Holy Sepulchre; and in 807 Harun not only sent further gifts, but appears to have confirmed the emperor's rights in Jerusalem, which, however, probably amounted to no more than an undefined protectorate over the Christians in that part of the world. While thus extending his influence even into Asia, there was scarcely any part of Europe where the power of Charles did not make itself felt. He had not visited Spain since the disaster of Roncesvalles, but he continued to take a lively interest in the affairs of that country. In 798 he had concluded an alliance with Alphonso II, king of the Asturias, and a series of campaigns mainly under the leadership of King Louis resulted in the establishment of the "Spanish march," a district between the Pyrenees and the Ebro stretching from Pampeluna to Barcelona, as a defence against the Saracens. In 799 the Balearic Islands had been handed over to Charles, and a long warfare was carried on both by sea and land between Frank and Saracen until 810, when peace was made between the emperor and El-Hakem, the emir of Cordova. Italy was equally the scene of continuous fighting. Grimoald of Benevento rebelled against his overlord; the possession of Venice and Dalmatia was disputed by the two empires; and Istria was brought into subjection.

With England the emperor had already entered into relations, and at one time a marriage was proposed between his son Charles and a daughter of Offa. king of the Mercians. English exiles were welcomed at his court; he was mainly instrumental in restoring Eardwulf to the throne of Northumbria in 800; and Einhard includes the Scots within the sphere of his influence. In eastern Europe the Avars had owned themselves completely under his power in 805; campaigns against the Czechs in 805 and 806 had met with some success, and about the same time the land of the Sorbs was ravaged; while at the western extremity of the continent the Breton nobles had done homage to Charles at Tours in 800. Thus the emperor's dominions now stretched from the Eider to the Ebro, and from the Atlantic to the Elbe, the Saale and the Raab, and they also included the greater part of Italy; while even beyond these bounds he exercised an acknowledged but shadowy authority. In 806 Charles arranged a division of his territories among his three legitimate sons, but this arrangement came to nothing owing to the death of Pippin in 810, and of the younger Charles in the following year. Charles then named his remaining son Louis as his successor; and at his father's command Louis took the crown from the altar and placed it upon his own head. This ceremony took place at Aix on the 11th of September 813. In 808 the Frankish authority over the Obotrites was interfered with by Gudrod (Godfrey), king of the Danes, who ravaged the Frisian coasts and spoke boastfully of leading his troops to Aix. To ward off these attacks Charles took a warm interest in the building of a fleet, which he reviewed in 811; but by this time Gudrod had been killed, and his successor Hemming made peace with the emperor.

In 811 Charles made his will, which shows that he contemplated the possibility of abdication. The bulk of his possessions were left to the twenty-one metropolitan churches of his dominions, and the remainder to his children, his servants and the poor. In his last years he passed most of his days at Aix, though he had sufficient energy to take the field for a short time during the Danish War. Early in 814 he was attacked by a fever which he sought to subdue by fasting; but pleurisy supervened, and after partaking of the communion, he died on the 28th of January 814, and on the same day his body was buried in the church of St Mary at Aix. In the year 1000 his tomb was opened by the emperor Otto III, but the account that Otto found the body upright upon a throne with a golden crown on the head and holding a golden sceptre in the hands, is generally regarded as legendary. The tomb was again opened by the emperor Frederick I in 1165, when the remains were removed from a marble sarcophagus and placed in a wooden coffin. Fifty years later they were transferred by order of the emperor Frederick II to a splendid shrine, in which the relics are still exhibited once in every six years. The sarcophagus in which the body originally lay may still be seen at Aix, and other relics of the great emperor are in the imperial treasury at Vienna. In 1165 Charles was canonized by the antipope Paschal III at the instance of the emperor Frederick I, and Louis XI of France gave strict orders that the feast of the saint should be observed.

The personal appearance of Charles is thus described by Einhard: "Big and robust in frame, he was tall, but not excessively so, measuring about seven of his own feet in height. His eyes were large and lustrous, his nose rather long and his countenance bright and cheerful." He had a commanding presence, a clear but somewhat feeble voice, and in later life became rather corpulent. His health was uniformly good, owing perhaps to his moderation in eating and drinking, and to his love for hunting and swimming. He was an affectionate father, and loved to pass his time in the company of his children, to whose education he paid the closest attention. His sons were trained for war and the chase, and his daughters instructed in the spinning of wool and other feminine arts. His ideas of sexual morality were primitive. Many concubines are spoken of, he had several illegitimate children, and the morals of his daughters were very loose. He was a regular observer of religious rites, took great pains to secure decorum in the services of the church, and was generous in almsgiving both within his empire and without. He reformed the Frankish liturgy, and brought singers from Rome to improve the services of the church. He had considerable knowledge of theology, took a prominent part in the theological controversies of the time, and was responsible for the addition of the clause filioque to the Nicene Creed. The most attractive feature of his character, however, was his love of learning. In addition to his native tongue he could read Latin and understood Greek, but he was unable to write, and Einhard gives an account of his futile efforts to learn this art in later life. He loved the reading of histories and astronomy, and by questioning travellers gained some knowledge of distant parts of the earth. He attended lectures on grammar, and his favourite work was St Augustine's De civitate Dei. He caused Frankish sagas to be collected, began a grammar of his native tongue, and spent some of his last hours in correcting a text of the Vulgate. He delighted in the society of scholars Alcuin, Angilbert, Paul the Lombard, Peter of Pisa and others, and in this company the trappings of rank were laid aside and the emperor was known simply as David. Under his patronage Alcuin organized the school of the palace, where the royal children were taught in the company of others, and founded a school at Tours which became the model for many other establishments. Charles was unwearying in his efforts to improve the education of clergy and laity, and in 789 ordered that schools should be established in every diocese. The atmosphere of these schools was strictly ecclesiastical and the questions discussed by the scholars were often puerile, but the greatness of the educational work of Charles will not be doubted when one considers the rude condition of Frankish society half a century before. The main work of the Carolingian renaissance was to restore Latin to its position as a literary language, and to reintroduce a correct system of spelling and an improved handwriting. The manuscripts of the time are accurate and artistic, copies of valuable books were made and by careful collation the texts were purified.

Charles was not a great warrior. His victories were won rather by the power of organization, which he possessed in a marked degree, and he was eager to seize ideas and prompt in their execution. He erected a stone bridge with wooden piers across the Rhine at Mainz, and began a canal between the Altmühl and the Rednitz to connect the Rhine and the Danube, but this work was not finished. He built palaces at Aix (his favourite residence), Nijmwegen and Ingelheim, and erected the church of St Mary at Aix, modelled on that of St Vitalis at Ravenna and adorned with columns and mosaics brought from the same city. He loved the simple dress and manners of the Franks, and on two occasions only did he assume the more stately attire of a Roman noble. The administrative system of Charles in church and state was largely personal, and he brought to the work an untiring industry, and a marvellous grasp of detail. He admonished the pope, appointed the bishops, watched over the morals and work of the clergy, and took an active part in the deliberations of church synods; he founded bishoprics and monasteries, was lavish in his gifts to ecclesiastical foundations, and chose bishops and abbots for administrative work. As the real founder of the ecclesiastical state, he must be held mainly responsible for the evils which resulted from the policy of the church in exalting the ecclesiastical over the secular authority.

In secular affairs Charles abolished the office of duke, placed counts over districts smaller than the former duchies, and supervised their government by means of missi dominici, officials responsible to himself alone. Marches were formed on all the borders of the empire, and the exigencies of military service led to the growth of a system of land-tenure which contained the germ of feudalism. The assemblies of the people gradually changed their character under his rule. No longer did the nation come together to direct and govern, but the emperor summoned his people to assent to his acts. Taking a lively interest in commerce and agriculture, Charles issued various regulations for the organization of the one and the improvement of the other. He introduced a new system of weights and measures, which he ordered should be used throughout his kingdom, and took steps to reform the coinage. He was a voluminous lawgiver. Without abolishing the customary law of the German tribes, which is said to have been committed to writing by his orders, he added to it by means of capitularies, and thus introduced certain Christian principles and customs, and some degree of uniformity.

The extent and glamour of his empire exercised a potent spell on western Europe. The aim of the greatest of his successors was to restore it to its pristine position and influence, while many of the French rulers made its re-establishment the goal of their policy. Otto the Great to a considerable extent succeeded; Louis XIV referred frequently to the empire of Charlemagne; and Napoleon regarded him as his prototype and predecessor. The empire of Charles, however, was not lasting. In spite of his own wonderful genius the seeds of weakness were sown in his lifetime. The church was too powerful, an incipient feudalism was present, and there was no real bond of union between the different races that acknowledged his authority. All the vigilance of the emperor could not restrain the dishonesty and the cupidity of his servants, and no sooner was the strong hand of their ruler removed than they began to acquire territorial power for themselves.

THE CHARLEMAGNE LEGENDS

Innumerable legends soon gathered round the memory of the great emperor. He was represented as a warrior performing superhuman feats, as a ruler dispensing perfect justice, and even as a martyr suffering for the faith. It was confidently believed towards the close of the loth century that he had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; and, like many other great rulers, it was reported that he was only sleeping to awake in the hour of his country's need. We know from Einhard (Vita Karoli, cap. xxix.) that the Frankish heroic ballads were drawn up in writing by Charlemagne's order, and it may be accepted as certain that he was himself the subject of many such during his lifetime. The legendary element crept even into the Latin panegyrics produced by the court poets. Before the end of the 9th century a monk of St Gall drew up a chronicle De gestis Karoli Magni, which was based partly on oral tradition, received from an old soldier named Adalbert, who had served in Charlemagne's army. This recital contains various fabulous incidents. The author relates a conversation between Otkar the Frank (Ogier the Dane) and the Lombard king Desiderius (Didier) on the walls of Pavia in view of Charlemagne's advancing army. To Didier's repeated question "Is this the emperor?" Otkar continues to answer "Not yet," adding at last "When thou shalt see the fields bristling with an iron harvest, and the Po and the Ticino swollen with sea-floods, inundating the walls of the city with iron billows, then shall Karl be nigh at hand." This episode, which bears the marks of popular heroic poetry, may well be the substance of a lost Carolingian cantilena.

The legendary Charlemagne and his warriors were endowed with the great deeds of earlier kings and heroes of the Frankish kingdom, for the romancers were not troubled by considerations of chronology. National traditions extending over centuries were grouped round Charlemagne, his father Pippin, and his son Louis. The history of Charles Martel especially was absorbed in the Charlemagne legend. But if Charles's name was associated with the heroism of his predecessors he was credited with equal readiness with the weaknesses of his successors. In the earlier chansons de geste he is invariably a majestic figure and represents within limitations the grandeur of the historic Charles. But in the histories of the wars with his vassals he is often little more than a tyrannical dotard, who is made to submit to gross insult. This picture of affairs is drawn from later times, and the sympathies of the poet are generally with the rebels against the monarchy. Historical tradition was already dim when the hypothetical and much discussed cantilenae, which may be taken to have formed the repository of the national legends from the 8th to the loth century, were succeeded in the nth and the early 12th centuries by the chansons de geste. The early poems of the cycle sometimes contain curious information on the Frankish methods in war, in council and in judicial procedure, which had no parallels in contemporary institutions. The account in the Chanson de Roland of the trial of Ganelon after the battle of Roncesvalles must have been adopted almost intact from earlier poets, and provides a striking example of the value of the chansons de geste to the historian of manners and customs. In general, however, the trouvère depicted the feeling and manners of his own time.

Charlemagne's wars in Italy, Spain and Saxony formed part of the common epic material, and there are references to his wars against the Slavs; but especially he remained in the popular mind as the great champion of Christianity against the creed of Mahomet, and even his Norman and Saxon enemies became Saracens in current legend. He is the Christian emperor directly inspired by angels; his sword Joyeuse contained the point of the lance used in the Passion; his standard was Romaine, the banner of St Peter, which, as the oriflamme of Saint Denis, was later to be borne in battle before the kings of France; and in 1164 Charles was canonized at the desire of the emperor Frederick I Barbarossa by the anti-pope Pascal III. This gave him no real claim to saintship, but his festival was observed in some places until comparatively recent times. Charlemagne was endowed with the good and bad qualities of the epic king, and as in the case of Agamemnon and Arthur, his exploits paled beside those of his chief warriors. These were not originally known as the twelve peers famous in later Carolingian romance. The twelve peers were in the first instance the companions in arms of Roland in the Teutonic sense. The idea of the paladins forming an association corresponding to the Arthurian Round Table first appears in the romance of Fierabras. The lists of them are very various, but all include the names of Roland and Oliver. The chief heroes who fought Charlemagne's battles were Roland; Ganelon, afterwards the traitor; Turpin, the fighting archbishop of Reims; Duke Naimes of Bavaria, the wise counsellor who is always on the side of justice; Ogier the Dane, the hero of a whole series of romances; and Guillaume of Toulouse, the defender of Narbonne. Gradually most of the chansons de geste were attached to the name of Charlemagne, whose poetical history falls into three cycles:—the geste du roi, relating his wars and the personal history of himself and his family; the southern cycle, of which Guillaume de Toulouse is the central figure; and the feudal epic, dealing with the revolts of the barons against the emperor, the rebels being invariably connected by the trouvères with the family of Doon de Mayence.

The earliest poems of the cycle are naturally the closest to historical truth. The central point of the geste du roi is the 11th-century Chanson de Roland, one of the greatest of medieval poems. Strangely enough the defeat of Roncesvalles, which so deeply impressed the popular mind, has not a corresponding importance in real history. But it chanced to find as its exponent a poet whose genius established a model for his successors, and definitely fixed the type of later heroic poems. The other early chansons to which reference is made in Roland—Aspremont, Enfances Ogier, Guiteclin, Balan, relating to Charlemagne's wars in Italy and Saxony are not preserved in their original form, and only the first in an early recension. Basin or Carl et Élégast (preserved in Dutch and Icelandic), the Voyage de Charlemagne à Jerusalem and Le Couronnement Looys also belong to the heroic period. The purely fictitious and romantic tales added to the personal history of Charlemagne and his warriors in the 13th century are inferior in manner, and belong to the decadence of romance. The old tales, very much distorted in the 15th-century prose versions, were to undergo still further degradation in 18th-century compilations.

According to Berte aus grans piés, in the 13th-century remaniement of the Brabantine trouvère Adenès li Rois, Charlemagne was the son of Pippin and of Berte, the daughter of Flore and Blanchefleur, king and queen of Hungary. The tale bears marks of high antiquity, and presents one of the few incidents in the French cycle which may be referred to a mythic origin. On the night of Berte's marriage a slave, Margiste, is substituted for her, and reigns in her place for nine years, at the expiration of which Blanchefleur exposes the deception; whereupon Berte is restored from her refuge in the forest to her rightful place as queen. Mainet (12th century) and the kindred poems in German and Italian are perhaps based on the adventures of Charles Martel, who after his father's death had to flee to the Ardennes. They relate that, after the death of his parents, Charles was driven by the machinations of the two sons of Margiste to take refuge in Spain, where he accomplished his enfances (youthful exploits) with the Mussulman king Galafre under the feigned name of Mainet. He delivered Rome from the besieging Saracens, and returned to France in triumph. But his wife Galienne, daughter of Galafre, whom he had converted to the Christian faith, died on her way to rejoin him. Charlemagne then made an expedition to Italy (Enfances Ogier in the Venetian Charlemagne, and the first part of the Chevalerie Ogier de Dannemarche by Raimbert of Paris, 12th century) to raise the siege of Rome, which was besieged by the Saracen emir Corsuble. He crossed the Alps under the guidance of a white hart, miraculously sent to assist the passage of the army. Aspremont (12th century) describes a fictitious campaign against the Saracen King Agolant in Calabria, and is chiefly devoted to the enfances of Roland. The wars of Charlemagne with his vassals are described in Girart de Roussillon, Renaus de Montauban, recounting the deeds of the four sons of Aymon, Huon de Bordeaux, and in the latter part of the Chevalerie Ogier, which belong properly to the cycle connected with Doon of Mayence.

The account of the pilgrimage of Charlemagne and his twelve paladins to the Holy Sepulchre must in its first form have been earlier than the Crusades, as the patriarch asks the emperor to free Spain, not the Holy Land, from the Saracens. The legend probably originated in a desire to authenticate the relics in the abbey of Saint Denis, supposed to have been brought to Aix by Charlemagne, and is preserved in a 12th-century romance, Le Voyage de Charlemagne à Jerusalem et à Constantinople. This journey forms the subject of a window in the cathedral of Chartres, and there was originally a similar one at Saint-Denis. On the way home Charles and his paladins visited the emperor Hugon at Constantinople, where they indulged in a series of gabs which they were made to carry out. Galien, a favourite 15th-century romance, was attached to this episode, for Galien was the son of the amours of Oliver with Jacqueline, Hugon's daughter. The traditions of Charlemagne's fights with the Norsemen (Norois, Noreins) are preserved in Aiquin (12th century), which describes the emperor's reconquest of Armorica from the "Saracen" king Aiquin, and a disaster at Cézembre as terrible in its way as those of Roncesvalles and Aliscans. La destruction de Rome is a 13th-century version of the older chanson of the emir Balan, who collected an army in Spain and sailed to Rome. The defenders were overpowered and the city destroyed before the advent of Charlemagne, who, however, avenged the disaster by a great battle in Spain. The romance of Fierabras (13th century) was one of the most popular in the 15th century, and by later additions came to have pretensions to be a complete history of Charlemagne. The first part represents an episode in Spain three years before Roncesvalles, in which Oliver defeats the Saracen giant Fierabras in single combat, and converts him. The hero of the second part is Gui de Bourgogne, who recovers the relics of the Passion, lost in the siege of Rome. Otinel (13th century) is also pure fiction. L'Entrée en Espagne, preserved in a 14th-century Italian compilation, relates the beginning of the Spanish War, the siege of Pampeluna, and the legendary combat of Roland with Ferragus. Charlemagne's march on Saragossa, and the capture of Huesca, Barcelona and Girone, gave rise to La Prise de Pampelune (14th century, based on a lost chanson); and Gui de Bourgogne (12th century) tells how the children of the barons, after appointing Guy as king of France, set out to find and rescue their fathers, who are represented as having been fighting in Spain for twenty-seven years. The Chanson de Roland relates the historic defeat of Roncesvalles on the 15th of August 778, and forms the very crown of the whole Carolingian legend. The two 13th-century romances, Gaidon, by Herbert Leduc de Dammartin, and Anséis de Carthage, contain a purely fictitious account of the end of the war in Spain, and of the establishment of a Frankish kingdom under the rule of Anséis. Charlemagne was recalled from Spain by the news of the outbreak of the Saxons. The contest between Charlemagne and Widukind (Guiteclin) offered abundant epic material. Unfortunately the original Guiteclin is lost, but the legend is preserved in Les Saisnes (c. 1300) of Jehan Bodel, which is largely occupied by the loves of Baudouin and Sibille, the wife of Guiteclin. The adventures of Blanchefleur, wife of Charlemagne, form a variation of the common tale of the innocent wife falsely accused, and are told in Macaire and in the extant fragments of La Reine Sibille (14th century). After the conquest of the Saracens and the Saxons, the defeat of the Northmen, and the suppression of the feudal revolts, the emperor abdicated in favour of his son Louis (Le Couronnement Looys, 12th century). Charles's harangue to his son is in the best tradition of epic romance. The memory of Roncesvalles haunts him on his death-bed, and at the moment of death he has a vision of Roland.

The mythic element is practically lacking in the French legends, but in Germany some part of the Odin myth was associated with Charles's name. The constellation of the Great Bear, generally associated with Odin, is Karlswagen in German, and Charles's Wain in English. According to tradition in Hesse, he awaits resurrection, probably symbolic of the triumph of the sun over winter, within the Gudensberg (Hill of Odin). Bavarian tradition asserts that he is seated in the Untersberg in a chair, as in his tomb at Aix-la-Chapelle. His white beard goes on growing, and when it has thrice encircled the stone table before him the end of the world will come; or, according to another version, Charles will arise and after fighting a great battle on the plain of Wals will reign over a new Germany. There were medieval chroniclers who did not fear to assert that Charles rose from the dead to take part in the Crusades. In the MS. Annales S. Stephani Frisingenses (15th century), which formerly belonged to the abbey of Weihenstephan, and is now at Munich, the childhood of Charlemagne is practically the same as that of many mythic heroes. This work, generally known as the chronicle of Weihenstephan, gives among other legends a curious history of the emperor's passion for a dead woman, caused by a charm given to Charles by a serpent to whom he had rendered justice. The charm was finally dropped into a well at Aix, which thenceforward became Charles's favourite residence. The story of Roland's birth from the union of Charles with his sister Gilles, also found in German and Scandinavian versions, has abundant parallels in mythology, and was probably transferred from mythology to Charlemagne.

The Latin chronicle, wrongly ascribed to Turpin (Tilpinus), bishop of Reims from 753 to 800, was in reality later than the earlier poems of the French cycle, and the first properly authenticated mention of it is in 1165. Its primary object was to authenticate the relics of St James at Compostella. Alberic Trium Fontium, a monk of the Cistercian monastery of Trois Fontanes in the diocese of Châlons, embodied much poetical fiction in his chronicle (c. 1249). A large section of the Chronique rimée (c. 1243) of Philippe Mousket is devoted to Charlemagne's exploits. At the beginning of the 14th century Girard of Amiens made a dull compilation known as Charlemagne from the chansons de gests, authentic history and the pseudo-Turpin. La Conqueste que fit le grand roi Charlemaigne es Espaignes (pr. 1486) is the same work as the prose compilation of Fierabras (pr. 1478), and Caxton's Lyf of Charles the Grete (1485).

The Charlemagne legend was fully developed in Italy, where it was to have later a great poetic development at the hands of Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso. There are two important Italian compilations, MS. XIII of the library of St Mark, Venice (c. 1200), and the Reali di Francia (c. 1400) of a Florentine writer, Andrea da Barberino (b. 1370), edited by G. Vandelli (Bologna, 1892). The six books of this work are rivalled in importance by the ten branches of the Norse Karlamagnus saga, written under the reign of Haakon V. This forms a consecutive legendary history of Charles, and is apparently based on earlier versions of the French Charlemagne poems than those which we possess. It thus furnishes a guide to the older forms of stories, and moreover preserves the substance of others which have not survived in their French form. A popular abridgment, the Keiser Karl Magnus Krönike (pr. Malmö, 1534), drawn up in Danish, serves in some cases to complete the earlier work. The 2000 lines of the German Kaiserchronik on the history of Charlemagne belong to the first half of the 12th century, and were perhaps the work of Conrad, the poet of the Ruolantes Liet. The German poet known as the Strieker used the same sources as the author of the chronicle of Weihenstephan for his Karl (c. 1230). The earliest important Spanish version was the Chronica Hispaniae (c. 1284) of Rodrigo de Toledo.

The French and Norman-French chansons circulated as freely in England as in France, and it was therefore not until the period of decadence that English versions were made. The English metrical romances of Charlemagne are:—Rowlandes Song (15th century); The Taill of Rauf Coilyear (c. 1475, pr. by R. Lekpreuik, St Andrews, 1472), apparently original; Sir Ferttmbras (c. 1380) and the Sowdone of Babylone (c. 1400) from an early version of Fierabras; a fragmentary Roland and Vernagu (Ferragus); two versions of Otuel (Otinel); and a Sege of Melayne (c. 1390), forming a prologue to Otinel unknown in French.

DOMBES, a district of eastern France, formerly part of the province of Burgundy, now comprised in the department of Ain, and bounded W. by the Saône, S. by the Rhone, E. by the Ain and N. by the district of Bresse. The region forms an undulating plateau with a slight slope towards the north-west, the higher ground bordering the Ain and the Rhone attaining an average height of about 1000 ft. The Dombes is characterized by an impervious surface consisting of boulder clay and other relics of glacial action. To this fact is due the large number of rain-water pools, varying for the most part from 35 to 250 acres in size which cover some 23,000 acres of its total area of 282,000 acres. These pools, artificially created, date in many cases from the 15th century, some to earlier periods, and were formed by landed proprietors who in those disturbed times saw a surer source of revenue in fish-breeding than in agriculture. Disease and depopulation resulted from this policy and at the end of the 18th century the Legislative Assembly decided to reduce the area of the pools which then covered twice their present extent. Drainage works were continued, roads cut, and other improvements effected during the 19th century. Large numbers of fish, principally carp, pike and tench are still reared profitably, the pools being periodically dried up and the ground cultivated.

The Dombes (Lat. Dumbae) once formed part of the kingdom of Aries. In the 11th century, when the kingdom began to break up, the northern part of the Dombes came under the power of the lords of Baugé, and in 1218, by the marriage of Marguerite de Baugé with Humbert IV of Beaujeu, passed to the lords of Beaujeu. The southern portion was held in succession by the lords of Villars and of Thoire. Its lords took advantage of the excommunication of the emperor Frederick II to assert their complete independence of the Empire. In 1400, Louis II, duke of Bourbon, acquired the northern part of the Dombes, together with the lordship of Beaujeu, and two years later bought the southern part from the sires de Thoire, forming the whole into a new sovereign principality of the Dombes, with Trevoux as its capital. The principality was confiscated by King Francis I in 1523, along with the other possessions of the Constable de Bourbon, was granted in 1527 to the queen-mother, Louise of Savoy, and after her death was held successively by kings Francis I, Henry II and Francis II, and by Catherine de Medici. In 1561 it was granted to Louis, duke of Bourbon-Montpensier, by "Mademoiselle," whose descendants it was held till, the duchess of Montpensier, gave it in to 1682, Louis XIV's bastard, the duke of Maine, as part of the price for the release of her lover Lauzun. The eldest son of the duke of Maine, Louis Auguste de Bourbon (1700-1755), prince of Dombes, served in the army of Prince Eugene against the Turks (1717), took part in the War of the Polish Succession (1733-1734), and in that of the Austrian Succession (1742-1747). He was made colonel-general of the Swiss regiment, governor of Languedoc and master of the hounds of France. He was succeeded, as prince of Dombes, by his brother the count of Eu, who in 1762 surrendered the principality to the crown. The little principality of Dombes showed in some respects signs of a vigorous life; the prince's mint and printing works at Trevoux were long famous, and the college at Thoissey was well endowed and influential.

FLANDERS (Flem. Vlaanderen), a territorial name for part of the Netherlands, Europe. Originally it applied only to Bruges and the immediate neighbourhood. In the 8th and 9th centuries it was gradually extended to the whole of the coast region from Calais to the Scheldt. In the middle ages this was divided into two parts, one looking to Bruges as its capital, and the other to Ghent. The name is retained in the two Belgian provinces of West and East Flanders.

1. West Flanders is the portion bordering the North Sea, and its coast-line extends from the French to the Dutch frontier for a little over 40 m. Its capital is Bruges, and the principal towns of the province are Ostend, Courtrai, Ypres and Roulers. Agri-culture is the chief occupation of the population, and the country is under the most careful and skilful cultivation. The admiration of the foreign observer for the Belgian system of market gardening is not diminished on learning that the subsoil of most of this tract is the sand of the "dunes." Fishing employs a large proportion of the coast population. The area of West Flanders is officially computed at 808,667 acres or 1263 sq. m. In 1904 the population was 845,732, giving an average of 669 to the sq. m.

2. East Flanders lies east and north-east of the western province; and extends northwards to the neighbourhood of Antwerp. It is still more productive and richer than Western Flanders, and is well watered by the Scheldt. The district of Waes, land entirely reclaimed within the memory of man, is supposed to be the most productive district of its size in Europe. The principal towns are Ghent (capital of the province), St Nicolas, Alost, Termonde, Eecloo and Oudenarde. The area is given at 749,987 acres or 1172 sq. m. In 1904 the population was 1,073,507, showing an average of 916 per sq. m.

History.—The ancient territory of Flanders comprised not only the modern provinces known as East and West Flanders, but the southernmost portion of the Dutch province of Zeeland and a considerable district in north-western France. In the time of Caesar it was inhabited by the Morini, Atrebates and other Celtic tribes, but in the centuries that followed the land was repeatedly overrun by German invaders, and finally became a part of the dominion of the Franks. On the break-up of the Carolingian empire the river Scheldt was by the treaty of Verdun (843) made the line of division between the kingdom of East Francia (Austrasia) under the emperor Lothaire, and the kingdom of West Francia (Neustria) under Charles the Bald. In virtue of this compact Flanders was henceforth attached to the West Frankish monarchy (France). It thus acquired a position unique among the provinces of the territory known in later times as the Netherlands, all of which were included in that northern part of Austrasia assigned on the death of the emperor Lothaire (855) to King Lothaire II, and from his name called Lotharingia or Lorraine.

The first ruler of Flanders of whom history has left any record is Baldwin, surnamed Bras-de-fer (Iron-arm). This man, a brave and daring warrior under Charles the Bald, fell in love with the king's daughter Judith, the youthful widow of two English kings, married her, and fled with his bride to Lorraine. Charles, though at first very angry, was at last conciliated, and made his son-in-law margrave (Marchio Flandriae) of Flanders, which he held as an hereditary fief. The Northmen were at this time continually devastating the coast lands, and Baldwin was entrusted with the possession of this outlying borderland of the west Frankish dominion in order to defend it against the invaders. He was the first of a line of strong rulers, who at some date early in the 10th century exchanged the title of margrave for that of count. His son, Baldwin II the Bald from his stronghold at Bruges maintained, as did his father before him, a vigorous defence of his lands against the incursions of the Northmen. On his mother's side a descendant of Charlemagne, he strengthened the dynastic importance of his family by marrying Aelfthryth, daughter of Alfred the Great. On his death in 918 his possessions were divided between his two sons Arnulf the Elder and Adolphus, but the latter survived only a short time and Arnulf succeeded to the whole inheritance. His reign was filled with warfare against the Northmen, and he took an active part in the struggles in Lorraine between the emperor Otto I and Hugh Capet. In his old age he placed the government in the hands of Baldwin, his son by Adela, daughter of the count of Vermandois, and the young man, though his reign was a very short one, did a great deal for the commercial and industrial progress of the country, establishing the first weavers and fullers at Ghent, and instituting yearly fairs at Ypres, Bruges and other places.

On Baldwin III's death in 961 the old count resumed the control, and spent the few remaining years of his life in securing the succession of his grandson Arnulf II—the Younger. The reign of Arnulf was terminated by his death in 989, and he was followed by his son Baldwin IV, named Barbatus or the Bearded. This Baldwin fought successfully both against the Capetian king of France and the emperor Henry II. Henry found himself obliged to grant to Baldwin IV in fief Valenciennes, the burgraveship of Ghent, the land of Waes, and Zeeland. The count of Flanders thus became a feudatory of the empire as well as of the French crown. The French fiefs are known in Flemish history as Crown Flanders (Kroon-Vlaanderen), the German fiefs as Imperial Flanders (Rijks-Vlaanderen). Baldwin's son afterwards Baldwin V rebelled in 1028 against his father at the instigation of his wife Adela, daughter of Robert II of France; but two years later peace was sworn at Oudenaarde, and the old count continued to reign till his death in 1036. Baldwin V proved a worthy successor, and acquired from the people the surname of Débonnaire. He was an active enterprising man, and greatly extended his power by wars and alliances. He obtained from the emperor Henry IV the territory between the Scheldt and the Dender as an imperial fief, and the margraviate of Antwerp. So powerful had he become that the Flemish count on the decease of Henry I of France in 1060 was appointed regent during the minority of Philip I.

Before his death he saw his eldest daughter Matilda (d. 1083) sharing the English throne with William the Conqueror, his eldest son Baldwin of Mons in possession of Hainaut in right of his wife Richilde, heiress of Regnier V (d. 1036) and widow of Hermann of Saxony (d. 1050/1), and his second son Robert the Frisian regent (voogd) of the county of Holland during the minority of Dirk V, whose mother, Gertrude of Saxony, widow of Floris I of Holland (d. 1061), Robert had married. On his death in 1067 his son Baldwin of Mons, already count of Hainaut, succeeded to the countship of Flanders. Baldwin V had granted to Robert the Frisian on his marriage in 1063 his imperial fiefs. His right to these was disputed by Baldwin VI, and war broke out between the two brothers. Baldwin was killed in battle in 1070. Robert now claimed the tutelage of Baldwin's children and obtained the support of the emperor Henry IV, while Richilde, Baldwin's widow, appealed to Philip I of France. The contest was decided at Ravenshoven, near Cassel, on the 22nd of February 1071, where Robert was victorious. Richilde was taken prisoner and her eldest son Arnulf III was slain. Robert obtained from Philip I the investiture of Crown Flanders, and from Henry IV the fiefs which formed Imperial Flanders.

The second son of Richilde was recognized as count of Hainaut, which was thus after a brief union separated from Flanders. Robert died in 1093, and was succeeded by his son Robert II, who acquired great renown by his exploits in the first crusade, and won the name of the Lance and Sword of Christendom. His fame was second only to that of Godfrey of Bouillon. Robert returned to Flanders in 1100. He fought with his suzerain Louis the Fat of France against the English, and was drowned in 1111 by the breaking of a bridge. His son and successor, Baldwin VII, or Baldwin with the Axe, also fought against the English in France. He died at the age of twenty-seven from the wound of an arrow, in 1119, leaving no heir. He nominated as his successor his cousin Charles, son of Knut IV of Denmark and of Adela, daughter of Robert the Frisian. Charles tried his utmost to put down oppression and to promote the welfare of his subjects, and obtained the surname of "the Good." His determination to enforce the right made him many enemies, and he was foully murdered on Ash Wednesday, 1127, at Bruges. He died childless, and there were no less than six candidates to the countship. The contest lay between two of these, William Clito, son of Robert of Normandy and grandson of William the Conqueror and Matilda of Flanders, and Thierry or Dirk of Alsace, whose mother Gertrude was a daughter of Robert the Frisian. William Clito, through the support of Louis of France, was at first accepted by the Flemish nobles as count, but he gave offence to the communes, who supported Thierry. A struggle ensued and William was killed before Alost. Thierry then became count without further opposition. He married the widow of Charles the Good, Marguerite of Clermont, and proved himself at home a wise and prudent prince, encouraging the growth of popular liberty and of commerce. In 1146 he took part in the second crusade and distinguished himself by his exploits. In 1157 he resigned the countship to his son Philip of Alsace and betook himself once years more later to Jerusalem. On his return from the East twenty years later Thierry retired to a monastery to die in his own land.

Count Philip of Alsace was a strong and able man. He did much to promote the growth of the municipalities for which Flanders was already becoming famous. Ghent, Bruges, Ypres, Lille and Douai under him made much progress as flourishing industrial towns. He also conferred rights and privileges on a number of ports, Hulst, Nieuwport, Sluis, Dunkirk, Axel, Damme, Gravelines and others. But while encouraging the development of the communes and "free towns," Philip sternly repressed any spirit of independence or attempted uprisings against his authority. This count was a powerful prince. He acted for a time as regent in France during the minority of his godson Philip Augustus, and married his ward to his niece Isabella of Hainaut (1180). Philip took part in the third crusade, and died in the camp before Acre of the pestilence in 1191.

As he had no children, the succession passed to Baldwin of Hainaut, who had married Philip's sister Margaret. The countships of Flanders and Hainaut were thus united under the same ruler. Baldwin did not obtain possession of Flanders without strong opposition on the part of the French king, and he was obliged to cede Artois, St Omer, Lens, Hesdin and a great part of southern Flanders to France, and to allow Matilda of Portugal, the widow of Philip of Alsace, to retain certain towns in right of her dowry. Margaret died in 1194 and Baldwin the following year, and their eldest son Baldwin IX succeeded to both countships. Baldwin IX is famous in history as the founder of the Latin empire at Constantinople. He perished in Bulgaria in 1206. The emperor's two daughters were both under age, and the government was carried on by their uncle Philip, marquess of Namur, whom Baldwin had appointed regent on his departure to Constantinople. Philip proved faithless to his charge, and he allowed his nieces to fall into the hands of Philip Augustus, who married the elder sister Johanna of Constantinople to his nephew Ferdinand of Portugal. The Flemings were averse to the French king's supremacy, and Ferdinand, who acted as governor in the name of his wife, joined himself to the confederacy formed by Germany, England, and the leading states of the Netherlands against Philip Augustus. Ferdinand was, however, taken prisoner at the disastrous battle of Bouvines (1214) and was kept for twelve years a prisoner in the Louvre. The countess Johanna ruled the united countships with prudence and courage. On Ferdinand's death she married Thomas of Savoy, but died in 1244, leaving no heirs. She was succeeded in her dignities by her younger sister Margaret of Constantinople, commonly known amongst her contemporaries as "Black Meg" (Zwarle Griet). Margaret had been twice married. Her first husband was (1212) Buchard of Avesnes, one of the first of Hainaut's nobles and a man of knightly prowess, but originally destined for the church. On this ground he was excommunicated by Innocent III and imprisoned by the countess Johanna, with the result that Margaret at last was driven to repudiate him. She married in second wedlock (1225) William of Dampierre. Two sons were the issue of the first marriage, three sons and three daughters of the second.

When Margaret in 1244 became countess of Flanders and Hainaut, she wished her son William of Dampierre to be acknowledged as her successor. John of Avesnes, her eldest son, strongly protested against this and was supported by the French king. A civil war ensued, which ended in a compromise (1246), the succession to Flanders being granted to William of Dampierre, that of Hainaut to John of Avesnes. Margaret, however, ruled with a strong hand for many years and survived both her sons, dying at the age of eighty in 1280. On her death her grandson, John II of Avesnes, became count of Hainaut: Guy of Dampierre, her second son by her second marriage, count of Flanders.

The two counties were once more under separate dynasties. The government of Guy of Dampierre was unfortunate. It was the interest of the Flemish weavers to be on good terms with England, the wool-producing country, and Guy entered into an alliance with Edward I against France. This led to an invasion and conquest of Flanders by Philip the Fair. Guy with his sons and the leading Flemish nobles were taken prisoners to Paris, and Flanders was ruled as a French dependency. But though in the principal towns, Ghent, Bruges and Ypres, there was a powerful French faction known as Leliaerts (adherents of the lily) the arbitrary rule of the French governor and officials stirred up the mass of the Flemish people to rebellion. The anti-French partisans (known as Clauwaerts) were strongest at Bruges under the leadership of Peter de Conync, master of the cloth-weavers, and John Breydel, master of the butchers. The French garrison at Bruges were massacred (May 19th, 1302), and on the following nth of July a splendid French army of invasion was utterly defeated near Courtray. Peace was concluded in 1305, but owing to Guy of Dampierre, and the leading Flemish nobles being in the hands of the French king, on terms very disadvantageous to Flanders. Very shortly afterwards the aged count Guy died, as did also Philip the Fair. Robert of Bethune, his son and successor, had continual difficulties with France during the whole of his reign, the Flemings offering a stubborn resistance to all attempts to destroy their independence. Robert was succeeded in 1322 by his grandson Louis of Nevers. Louis had been brought up at the French court, and had married Margaret of France. His sympathies were entirely French, and he made use of French help in his contests with the communes.

Under Louis of Nevers Flanders was practically reduced to the status of a French province. In his time the long contest between Flanders and Holland for the possession of the island of Zeeland was brought to an end by a treaty signed on the 6th of March 1323, by which West Zeeland was assigned to the count of Holland, the rest to the count of Flanders. The latter part of the reign of Louis of Nevers was remarkable for the successful revolt of the Flemish communes, now rapidly advancing to great material prosperity under Jacob van Artevelde. Artevelde allied himself with Edward III of England in his contest with Philip of Valois for the French crown, while Louis of Nevers espoused the cause of Philip. He fell at the battle of Crecy (1346). He was followed in the countship by his son Louis II of Male. The reign of this count was one long struggle with the communes, headed by the town of Ghent, for political supremacy. Louis was as strong in his French sympathies as his father, and relied upon French help in enforcing his will upon his refractory subjects, who resented his arbitrary methods of government, and the heavy taxation imposed upon them by his extravagance and love of display. Had the great towns with their organized gilds and great wealth held together in their opposition to the count's despotism, they would have proved successful, but Ghent and Bruges, always keen rivals, broke out into open feud. The power of Ghent reached its height under Philip van Artevelde in 1382. He defeated Louis, took Bruges and was made ruward of Flanders. But the triumph of the White Hoods, as the popular party was called, was of short duration. On the 27th of November 1382 Artevelde suffered a crushing defeat from a large French army at Roosebeke and was himself slain. Louis of Male died two years later, leaving an only daughter Margaret, who had married in 1369 Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy.

Flanders now became a portion of the great Burgundian domain, which in the reign of Philip the Good, Margaret's grandson, had absorbed almost the whole of the Netherlands. The history of Flanders as a separate state ceases from the time of the acquisition of the countship by the Burgundian dynasty. There were revolts from time to time of great towns against the exactions even of these powerful princes, but they were in vain. The conquest and humiliation of Bruges by Philip the Good in 1440, and the even more relentless punishment inflicted on rebellious Ghent by the emperor Charles V exactly a century later are the most remarkable incidents in the long-continued but vain struggle of the Flemish communes to maintain and assert their privileges. The Burgundian dukes and their successors of the house of Habsburg were fully alive to the value to them of Flanders and its rich commercial cities. It was Flanders that furnished to them no small part of their resources, but for this very reason, while fostering the development of Flemish industry and trade, they were the more determined to brook no opposition which sought to place restrictions upon their authority.

The effect of the revolt of the Netherlands and the War of Dutch Independence which followed was ruinous to Flanders. Albert and Isabel on their accession to the sovereignty of the southern Netherlands in 1599 found "the great cities of Flanders and Brabant had been abandoned by a large part of their inhabitants; agriculture hardly in a less degree than commerce and industry had been ruined." In 1633 with the death of Isabel, Flanders reverted to Spanish rule (1633). By the treaty of Munster the north-western portion of Flanders, since known as States (or Dutch) Flanders, was ceded by Philip IV to the United Provinces (1648). By a succession of later treaties—of the Pyrenees (1659), Aix-la-Chapelle (1668), Nijmwegen (1679) and others a large slice of the southern portion of the old county of Flanders became French territory and was known as French Flanders.

From 1795 to 1814 Flanders, with the rest of the Belgic provinces, was incorporated in France, and was divided into two departments—département de l'Escaut and département de la Lys. This division has since been retained, and is represented by the two provinces of East Flanders and West Flanders in the modern kingdom of Belgium. The title of count of Flanders was revived by Leopold I in 1840 in favour of his second son, Philip Eugene Ferdinand (d. 1905).

ST JOHN OF JERUSALEM, KNIGHTS OF THE ORDER OF THE HOSPITAL OF (Ordo fratrum hospitalariorum Hierosolymitanorum, Ordo militiae Sancti Johannis Baptistae hospitalis Hierosolymitani), known also later as the KNIGHTS OF RHODES and the SOVEREIGN ORDER OF THE KNIGHTS OF MALTA. The history of this order divides itself naturally into four periods: (1) From its foundation in Jerusalem during the First Crusade to its expulsion from the Holy Land after the fall of the Latin kingdom in 1291; (2) from 1309-1310, when the order was established in Rhodes, to its expulsion from the island in 1522; (3) from 1529 to 1798, during which its headquarters were in Malta; (4) its development, as reconstituted after its virtual destruction in 1798, to the present day.

Early Developments.—Medieval legend set back the beginnings to the days of the Maccabees, with King Antiochus as the founder and Zacharias, father of the Baptist, as one of the first masters; later historians of the order maintained that it was established as a military order contemporaneously with the Latin conquest of Jerusalem, and that it had no connexion with any earlier foundation (so P. A. Paoli, De origine). This view would now seem to be disproved, and it is clear that the order was connected with an earlier Hospitale Hierosolymitanum. Such a hospital had existed in the Holy City, with rare interruptions, ever since it had become a centre of Christian pilgrimage. About 1023 certain merchants of Amalfi had purchased the site of the Latin hospice established by Charlemagne, destroyed in 1010 with the other Christian establishments by order of the fanatical caliph Hakim Biamrillah, and had there founded a hospital for pilgrims, served by Benedictines and later dedicated to St John the Baptist. When, in 1087, the crusaders surrounded the Holy City, the head of this hospital was a certain Gerard or Gerald, who earned their gratitude by assisting them in some way during the siege. After the capture of the city he used his popularity to enlarge and reconstitute the hospital. If, as M. Le Roulx surmises, he had previously been affiliated to the Benedictines, he now left them and adopted for his order the Augustinian rule. Donations and privileges were showered upon the new establishment. Godfrey de Bouillon led the way by granting to it in Jerusalem itself the casal Hessilia (Es Silsileh) and two bakehouses. Kings, nobles and prelates followed suit, not in the Holy Land only, but in Provence, France, Spain, Portugal, England and Italy: in Portugal a whole province was in 1114 made over to Gerard and his brethren (Cartul. i. No. 34). In 1113 Pope Paschal II took the order and its possessions under his immediate protection (bull of Feb. 15th to Gerard, Cartul. i. No. 30), his act being confirmed in 1119 by Calixtus II and subsequently by other popes. Gerard was indeed, as Pope Paschal called him, the "institutor" of the order, if not its founder. It retained, however, during his lifetime its purely eleemosynary character. The armed defence of pilgrims may have been part of its functions, but its organization as an aggressive military force was the outcome of special circumstances—the renewed activity of the Saracens—and was the work of Raymond du Puy, who succeeded as grand master on the death of Gerard (3rd of September 1120).

Not that Raymond can be proved to have given to his order anything of its later aristocratic constitution. There is no mention in his Rule of the division into knights, chaplains and sergeants; indeed, there is no mention of any military duties whatever. It merely lays down certain rules of conduct and discipline for the brethren. They are to be bound by the threefold vow of chastity, poverty and obedience. They are to claim nothing for themselves quality, "since our Lord's poor, whose servants we say we are, go naked and sordid, and it is a disgrace for the servant to be proud when his master is humble." Finally, the brethren are to wear crosses on the breast of their capes and matles, "ut Deus peripsum vexillum et fidem et operationem et obedientiam nos custodiat." Yet that Raymond laid down military regulations for the brethren is certain. Their underlying principle is revealed by a bull of Pope Alexander III addressed (1178-1180) to the grand master Roger des Moulins, in which he bids him, "according to the custom of Raymond," abstain from bearing arms save when the standard of the Cross is displayed either for the defence of the kingdom or in an attack on a "pagan" city.

The statesmanlike qualities of Raymond du Puy rendered his long mastership epoch-making for the order. When it was decided to fortify Ibelin (Beit-Jibrin) as an outpost against attacks from the side of Ascalon, it was to the Hospitallers that the building and defence of the new castle were assigned; and from 1137 onwards they took a regular part in the wars of the Cross. It was owing to Raymond's diplomatic skill, too, that the order was enabled to profit by the bequest made to it by Alphonso I of Aragon, who had died childless, of a third of his kingdom. To have claimed the literal fulfilment of this bequest would have been to risk losing it all, and Raymond acted wisely in transferring the bequest, with certain important reservations, to Raymond Berenger IV, count of Barcelona and regent of Aragon (16th of September 1140). It was probably also during his sojourn in the West for the above purpose that Raymond secured from Pope Celestine II the bull dated December 7th, 1143, subordinating to his jurisdiction the Teutonic hospice, founded in 1128 by a German pilgrim and his wife in honour of the Blessed Virgin, which was the nucleus of the Teutonic Order. This order was to remain subordinate to the Hospitallers actually for some fifty years, and nominally for some thirty years longer. Raymond took part in the Second Crusade and was present at the council of the leaders held at Acre, in 1148, which resulted in the ill-fated expedition against Damascus. The failure before Damascus was repaired five years later by the capture of Ascalon (19th of August 1153), in which Raymond du Puy and his knights had a conspicuous share.

Meanwhile, in addition to its ever-growing wealth, the order had received from successive popes privileges which rendered it, like the companion order of the Temple, increasingly independent of and obnoxious to the secular clergy. In 1135 Innocent II had confirmed to Raymond the privileges accorded by Paschal II, Calixtus II and Honorious II, and in addition forbade the diocesan bishops to interdict the churches of the Hospitallers, whom he also authorized, in case of a general interdict, to celebrate mass for themselves alone. In 1137 he gave them the privilege of Christian burial during such interdicts and the right to open interdicted churches once a year in order to say mass and collect money. These bulls were confirmed by Eugenius III in 1153 and Anastasius IV in 1154, the latter adding the permission for the order to have its own priest, independent of the diocesan bishops. In vain the patriarch of Jerusalem, attended by other bishops, journeyed to Rome in 1155 to complain to Adrian IV of the Hospitallers' abuse of their privileges and to beg him to withdraw his renewal of his predecessor's bull.

Far different was the effect produced by Raymond du Puy's triumphant progress through southern Europe from the spring of 1157 onward. From the popes, the emperor Frederick I, kings and nobles, he received fresh gifts, or the confirmation of old ones. After the 25th of October 1158, when his presence is attested at Verona, this master builder of the order disappears from history; he died some time between this date and 1160, when the name of another grand master appears.

During the thirty years of his rule the Hospital, which Gerard had instituted to meet a local need, had become universal. In the East its growth was beyond calculation: kings, prelates and laity had overwhelmed it with wealth. In the West, all Europe combined to enrich it; from Ireland to Bohemia and Hungary, from Italy and Provence to Scandinavia, men vied with each other to attract it and establish it in their midst. It was clear that for this vast institution an elaborate organization was needed, and this need was probably the occasion of Raymond's presence in Europe. The priory of St Gilles already existed as the nucleus of the later system; the development of this system took place after Raymond's death.

Constitution and Organization.—The rule of the Hospital, as formulated by Raymond du Puy, was based on that of the Augustinian Canons. Its further developments, of which only the salient characteristics can be mentioned here, were closely analogous to those of the Templars, whose statutes regulating the life of the brethren, the terms of admission to the order, the maintenance of discipline, and the scale of punishments, culminating in expulsion (pert de la maison), are, mutatis mutandis, closely paralleled by those of the Hospitallers. These, too, were early (probably in Raymond's time) divided into three classes: knights (fratres milites), chaplains (fratres capellani), and serjeants (fratres servientes armigeri), with affiliated brethren (confratres) and "donats" (donati, i.e. regular subscribers, as it were, to the order in return for its privileges and the ultimate right to enter the ranks of its knights). Similar, too, was the aristocratic rule which confined admission to the first class to sons born in lawful wedlock of knights or members of knightly families, a rule which applied also to the donats. For the serjeant men-at-arms it sufficed that they should not be serfs. Below these a host of servientes did the menial work of the houses of the order, or worked as artisans or as labourers on the farms.

All the higher offices in the order were filled by the knights, except the ecclesiastical which fell to the chaplains and those of master of the squires and turcopolier (commander of the auxiliary light cavalry), which were reserved for the serjeants-at-arms. Each knight was allowed three horses, each serjeant two. The fratres capellani ranked with the knights as eligible for certain temporal posts; at their head was the "conventual prior" (clericorum magister et ecclesie custos, prior clericorum Hospitalis).

In two important respects the Knights of St John differed from the Templars. The latter were a purely military organization; the Hospitallers, on the other hand, were at the outset preponderatingly a nursing brotherhood, and, though this character was subordinated during their later period of military importance, it never disappeared. It continued to be a rule of the order that in its establishments it was for the sick to give orders, for the brethren to obey. The chapters were largely occupied with the building, furnishing, and improvement of hospitals, to which were attached learned physicians and surgeons, who had the privilege of messing with the knights. The revenues of particular properties were charged with providing luxuries (e.g. white bread) for the patients, and the various provinces of the order with the duty of forwarding blankets, clothes, wine and food for their use. The Hospitallers, moreover, encouraged the affiliation of women to their order, which the monastic and purely military rule of the Templars sternly forbade. So early as the First Crusade a Roman lady named Alix or Agnes had founded at Jerusalem a hospice for women in connexion with the order of St John. Until 1187, when they fled to Europe, the sisters had devoted themselves to prayer and sick-nursing. In Europe, however, they developed into a purely contemplative order.

The habit of the order, both in peace and war, was originally a black cappa clausa (i.e. the long monastic bell-like cloak with a slit on each side of the arms) with a white, eight-pointed "Maltese" cross on the breast. As this was highly inconvenient for fighting, Innocent IV in 1248 authorized the brethren to wear in locis suspectis a large super-tunic with a cross on the breast (Cartul. ii. No. 2479), and in 1259 Alexander IV fixed the habit as, in peace time, a black mantle, and in war a red surcoat with a white cross (Cartul. ii. No. 2928).

The unit of the organization of the order was the commandery (preceptory), a small group of knights and serjeants living in community under the rule of a commander, or preceptor, charged with the supervision of several contiguous properties. The commanderies were grouped into priories, each under the rule of a prior (styled unofficially "grand prior," magnus prior), and these again into provinces corresponding to certain countries, under the authority of grand commanders. These largest groups crystallized in the 14th century as national divisions under the name of "langues" (languages). At the head of the whole organization was the grand master. The grand master was elected, from the ranks of the knights of justice, by the same process as the grand master of the Templars. Alone of the bailiffs (bailivi), as the officials of the order were generically termed, he held office for life. His authority was very great, but not absolute. The supreme legislative and controlling power was vested in the general chapter of the knights, at the periodical meetings of which the great officers of the order had to give an account of their stewardship, and which alone had the right to pass statutes binding on the order. The executive power of the grand master, like that of the great dignitaries immediately subordinate to him, was in the nature of a delegation from the chapter. He was assisted in its exercise by four councils: (l) the "convent" or ordinary chapter, a committee of the general chapter, for administrative business; (2) a secret council, for criminal cases and affairs of state; (3) a full council, to hear appeals from the two former; and (4) the "venerable chamber of the treasury" for financial matters. To the general chapter at headquarters corresponded the chapters of the priories and the commanderies, which controlled the action of the priors and commanders.

Immediately subordinate to the grand master were the seven great dignitaries of the order, known as the conventual bailiffs: the grand preceptor, marshal, draper (Fr. drapier) or grand conservator, hospitaller, treasurer, admiral, turcopolier. The grand preceptor, elected by the chapter at the same time as the grand master and subject to his approval, was the lieutenant of the latter in his absence, empowered to seal for him and, in the event of his capture by the enemy, to act as vice-master. The functions of the marshal, draper, treasurer and turcopolier were practically identical with those of the officials of the same titles in the order of Knights Templars. That of hospitaller, on the other hand, was naturally a charge of exceptional importance in the order of St John; he had a seal of his own, and was responsible for everything concerning the hospitals of the order, the dispensing of hospitality, and of alms. The admiral, as the name implies, was at sea what the marshal was on land. The office first appears in 1299 when the knights, after their expulsion from the Holy Land, had begun to organize their new sea-power in Cyprus. As to the equipage and suites of the grand master and the great dignitaries, these were practically on the same scale and of the same nature as those described in the article TEMPLARS for the sister order. The grand master had the right himself to nominate his companions and the members of his household (seneschal, squires, secretaries, chaplains, &c.), which, as Le Roulx points out, was such as to enable him to figure as the equal of the kings and princes with whom he consorted.

The grand-mastership of Gilbert d'Assailly was signalized by the participation of the Hospitallers in the abortive expeditions of Amalric of Jerusalem into Egypt in 1162, 1168 and 1169. On the loth of August 1164 also they shared in the disastrous defeat inflicted by Nur-ed-din at Harran on the count of Tripoli. The important position occupied by them in the councils of the kingdom is shown by the fact that the grand preceptor Guy de Mauny was one of the ambassadors sent in 1169 to ask aid of the princes of the West. Another important development was the bestowal on the order by Bohemund III, prince of Antioch, in 1168, and King Amalric, as regent of Tripoli, in 1170, of considerable territories on the north-eastern frontier, to be held with almost sovereign power as a march against the Saracens (Cartulairc, i. Nos. 391, 411). The failure of the expedition to Egypt, however, brought considerable odium on Gilbert d'Assailly, who resigned the grand-mastership, probably in the autumn of 1170. Under the short rule of the grand master Jobert (d. 1177) the question of a renewed attack on Egypt was mooted; but the confusion reigning in the Latin kingdom and, not least, the scandalous quarrels between the Templars and Hospitallers, rendered all aggressive action impossible. In 1179 the growing power of the two military orders received its first set back when, at the instance of the bishops, the Lateran Council forbade them to receive gifts of churches and tithes at the hands of laymen without the consent of the bishops, ordered them to restore all "recent" gifts of this nature, and passed a number of decrees in restraint of the abuse of their privileges.

A more potent discipline was to befall them, however, at the hands of Saladin, sultan of Egypt, who in 1186 began his systematic conquest of the kingdom. It was the Hospitallers who, with the other religious orders, alone offered an organized resistance to his victorious advance. On the 1st of May 1187 occurred the defeat of Tiberias, in which the grand master Gilbert des Moulins fell riddled with arrows, and this was followed on the 4th of July by the still more disastrous battle of Hittin. The flower of the Christian chivalry was slain or captured; the Hospitallers and Templars who fell into his hands Saladin massacred in cold blood. On the 2nd of October Jerusalem fell. Ten brethren of the Hospital were allowed to remain for a year to look after the sick; the rest took refuge at Tyre. In these straits Armengaud d'Asp was elected grand master (1188) and the headquarters of the order were established at Margat (Markab), near the coast some distance northwards of Tripoli. In the interior the knights still held some scattered fortresses; but their great stronghold of Krak was reduced by famine in September 1188 and Beauvoir in the following January.

The news of these disasters once more roused the crusading spirit in Europe; the offensive against Saladin was resumed, the Christians concentrating their forces against Acre in the autumn of 1189. In the campaigns that followed, of which Richard I of England was the most conspicuous hero, and which ended in the recovery of Acre and the sea-coast generally for the Latin kingdom, the Hospitallers, under their grand master Gamier de Naplouse (Neapoli), played a prominent part. The grand-mastership of Geoffroy de Donjon, who succeeded Gamier in 1192 and ruled the order till 1202, was signalized, not by feats of arms, since the Holy Land enjoyed a precarious peace, but by a steady restoration and development of the property and privileges of the order, by renewed quarrels with the Templars, and in 1198 by the establishment in face of the protests of the Hospitallers of the Teutonic knights as a separate order. Under the grand-mastership of the pious Alphonso of Portugal, and of Geoffrey le Rat, who was elected on Alphonso's resignation in 1206, the knights took a vigorous part in the quarrel as to the succession in Antioch; under that of Garin de Montaigu (elected 1207) they shared in the expedition to Egypt (1218-1221), of which he had been a vigorous advocate. In 1222, at the instance of the emperor Frederick II, the grand master accompanied the king of Jerusalem and others to Europe to discuss the preparation of a new crusade, visiting Rome, proceeding thence to Paris and London, and returning to the Holy Land in 1225. The expedition failed of its object so far as the organization of a general crusade was concerned; but the Hospital received everywhere enormous accessions of property. Garin de Montaigu died in 1228, after consolidating by his statesmanlike attitude the position and power of his order, on the eve of Frederick II's crusade. In this crusade, conducted in spite of a papal excommunication, the Hospitallers took no part, being rewarded with the approval of Pope Gregory IX, who, in August 1229, issued a bull to the patriarch of Jerusalem ordering him to maintain the jurisdiction of the Hospital over the Teutonic knights, who had dared to assist the German emperor. In 1233, under the grand master Guerin, the Hospitallers took a leading part in the successful attack on the principality of Hamah. The motive of this, however which was no more than the refusal of the emir to pay them the tribute due seems to point to an increasing secularization of their spirit. In 1236 Pope Gregory IX thought it necessary to threaten both them and the Templars with excommunication, to prevent their forming an alliance with the Assassins, and in 1238 issued a bull in which he inveighed against the scandalous lives and relaxed discipline of the Hospitallers.

Events were soon to expose the order to fresh tests. Under the grand-mastership of Pierre de Vieille Bride occurred the brief "crusade" of Richard of Cornwall (11th of October 1240 to 3rd of May 1241). The truce concluded by Richard with the sultan of Egypt was accepted by the Hospitallers, rejected by the Templars, and after his departure something like a war broke out between the two bodies. In the midst of the strife of parties, in which Richard of Cornwall had recognized the fatal weakness of the Christian cause to lie, came the news of the invasion of the Chorasmians. On the 23rd of August the Tatar horde took and sacked Jerusalem. On the 17th of October, in alliance with the Egyptians under Bibars, it overwhelmed the Christian host at Gaza. Of the Hospitallers only sixteen escaped; 325 of the knights were slain; and among the prisoners was the grand master, Guillaume de Châteauneuf. Amid the general ruin that followed this defeat, the Hospitallers held out in the fortress of Ascalon, until forced to capitulate on the 15th of October 1247. Under the vice-master, the grand preceptor Jean de Ronay, they took part in 1249 in the Egyptian expedition of St Louis of France, only to share in the crushing defeat of Mansurah (11th of February 1250). Of the knights present all were slain, except five who were taken prisoners, the vice-master and one other. At the instance of St Louis, after the conclusion of peace, 25 Hospitallers, together with the grand master Guillaume de Châteauneuf, were released.

On the withdrawal of St Louis from the Holy Land (April 1254), a war of aggression and reprisals broke out between Christians and Mussulmans; and no sooner was this ended by a precarious truce than the Christians fell to quarrelling among themselves. In the war between the Genoese and Venetians and their respective partisans, the Hospitallers and Templars fought on opposite sides. In spite of so great a scandal and of the hopeless case of the Christian cause, the possessions of the order were largely increased during Guillaume de Châteauneuf's mastership, both in the Holy Land and in Europe.

Under the grand-mastership of Hugues de Revel, elected probably in 1255, the menace of a new Tatar invasion led to serious efforts to secure harmony in the kingdom. In 1258 the Templars, Hospitallers, and Teutonic knights decided to submit their disputes in Syria, Cyprus and Armenia to arbitration, a decision which bore fruit in 1260 in the settlement of their differences in Tripoli and Margat. The satisfactory arrangement was possibly affected by the result of a combined attack made in 1259 on the Hospitallers by the Templars and the brethren of St Lazarus and St Thomas, which had resulted in the practical extermination of the aggressors, possibly also by the crushing defeat of the Templars and the Syrian barons by the Turcomans at Tiberias in 1260. However achieved, the concord was badly needed; for Bibars, having in 1260 driven back the Tatars and established himself in the sultanate of Egypt, began the series of campaigns which ended in the destruction of the Latin kingdom. In 1268 Bibars conquered Antioch, and the Christian power was confined to Acre, Château Pélerin, Tyre, Sidon, and the castles of Margat, Krak and Belda (Baldeh), in which the Hospitallers still held out. The respite afforded by the second crusade of St Louis was ended by his death at Tunis in 1270. On the 3Oth of March 1271 the great fortress of Krak, the key to the county of Tripoli, surrendered after a short siege. The crusade of Prince Edward of England did little to avert the ultimate fate of the kingdom, and with it that of the Hospitallers in the Holy Land. This was merely delayed by the preoccupations of Bibars elsewhere, and by his death in 1277. In 1280 the Mongols overran northern Syria; and the Hospitallers distinguished themselves by two victories against enormous odds, one over the Turcomans and one over the emir of Krak (February 1281). The situation, however, was desperate, and the grand master Nicolas Lorgne, who had succeeded Hugues de Revel in 1277, wrote despairing letters of appeal to Edward I of England. On the 25th of May 1285, Margat surrendered to the sultan Kalaun (Mansur Saifaldin). Not even the strong character and high courage of Jean de Villiers, who succeeded Nicolas Lorgne as grand master in 1285, could do more than stave off the ultimate disaster. The Hospitallers assisted in the vain defence of Tripoli, which fell on the 26th of April 1289. On the 18th of May 1291 the Mussulmans stormed Acre, the last hope of the Christians in the Holy Land. Jean de Villiers, wounded, was carried on board a ship, and sailed to Limisso in Cyprus, which became the headquarters of the order. For the remaining two years of his life Jean de Villiers was occupied in attempting the reorganization of the shattered order. The demoralization in the East was, however, too profound to admit a ready cure. The knights, represented by the grand dignitaries, addressed a petition to Pope Boniface VIII in 1295 asking for the appointment of a permanent council of seven difinitores to control the grand master, who had become more and more autocratic. The pope did not consent; but in a severe letter to the new grand master, Eudes de Pin, he sternly reproved him for the irregularities of which he had been guilty. In 1296 Eudes was succeeded by Guillaume de Villaret, grand prior of St Gilles, who for three years after his election remained in Europe, regulating the affairs of the order. In 1300, in response to the urgent remonstrances of the knights, he appeared in Cyprus. In 1299 an unnatural alliance of the Christians and Mongols gave a momentary prospect of regaining the Holy Land; in 1300 the Hospitallers took part in the raid of King Henry II (de Lusignan) of Cyprus in Egypt, and gained some temporary successes on the coast of Syria. Of more advantage for the prestige of the order, however, were the immense additions of property and privileges which Guillaume de Villaret had secured in Europe from the pope and many kings and princes, and the reform of the rule and drastic reorganization of the order promulgated in a series of statutes between 1300 and 1304, the year of Guillaume's death. Of these changes the most significant was the definition of the powers and status of the admiral, a new great dignitary created in 1299.

The grand-mastership of Foulques de Villaret, Guillaume's nephew and successor, was destined to be eventful for the order. On the 5th of June 1305 Bertrand de Got became pope as Clement V. The new pope consulted the grand master of the Templars and Hospitallers as to the organization of a new crusade, and at the same time raised the question of the fusion of the military orders, a plan which had already been suggested by St Louis, discussed at the council of Lyons in 1274, and approved by the pope's patron Philip IV of France. The proposal broke down on the opposition of Jacques de Molay, grand master of the Temple; but the desired result was obtained by other and more questionable means. In October 1307 Philip IV caused all the Templars in France, including the grand master, to be arrested on charges of heresy and gross immorality; Pope Clement V, a creature of the French king, reluctantly endorsed this action, and at his instance the other sovereigns of Europe followed the example of Philip. The famous long-drawn-out trial of the Templars followed, ending at the council of Vienne in 1314, when Pope Clement decreed the dissolution of the order of the Temple and at the same time assigned the bulk of its property to the Hospital.

Meanwhile an event had occurred which marks an epoch in the history of the order of the Hospital. In 1306 Foulques de Villaret, anxious to find a centre where the order would be untrammelled by obligations to another power as in Cyprus, came to an agreement with a Genoese pirate named Vignolo de'Vignoli for a concerted attack on Rhodes and other islands belonging to the Greek emperor. The exact date of their completed conquest of the island is uncertain; nor is it clear that the grand master took a personal part in it. By command of the pope he had left Cyprus for Europe at the end of 1306 or the beginning of 1307, and he did not return to the East till late in 1309. He returned, however, not to Cyprus but to Rhodes, and it is with 1310, therefore, when its headquarters were established in the latter island, that the second period of the history of the order of the Hospital opens.

The Knights in Rhodes.—The history of the order for the next fifty years is very obscure. Certain changes, however, took place which profoundly modified its character. The most important of these was its definitive division into "langues." The beginnings of this had been made long before; but the system was only legalized by the general chapter at Montpellier in 1330. Hitherto the order had been a cosmopolitan society, in which the French element had tended to predominate; henceforth it became a federation of national societies united only for purposes of commerce and war. To the headship of each "langue" was attached one of the great dignitaries of the order, which thus came to represent, not the order as a whole but the interests of a section. The motive of this change was probably, as Prutz suggests, fear of the designs of Philip IV of France and his successors to which point had been given by the fate of the Templars, and the consequent desire to destroy the preponderance of the French element.

The character and aims of the order were also profoundly affected by their newly acquired sovereignty for the shadowy overlordship of the Eastern emperor was soon forgotten and above all by its seat. The Teutonic order had established its sovereignty in Prussia, in wide and ill-defined spheres beyond the north-eastern marches of Germany. The Hospitallers ruled an island too narrow to monopolize their energies, but occupying a position of vast commercial and strategic importance. Close to the Anatolian mainland, commanding the outlet of the Archipelago, and lying in the direct trade route between Europe and the East, Rhodes had become the chief distributing point in the lively commerce which, in spite of papal thunders, Christian traders maintained with the Mahommedan states; and in the new capital of the order representatives to every language and religion of the Levant jostled, haggled and quarrelled. The Hospitallers were thus divided between their duty as sovereign, which was to watch over the interests of their subjects, and their duty as Christian warriors, which was to combat the Infidel. In view of the fact that the crusading spirit was everywhere declining, it is not surprising that their policy was henceforth directed less by religious than by political and commercial considerations. Not that they altogether neglected their duty as protectors of the Cross. Their galleys policed the narrow seas; their consuls in Egypt and Jerusalem watched over the interests of pilgrims; their hospitals were still maintained for the service of the sick and the destitute. But, side by side with this, secularization proceeded apace. In 1341 Pope Clement VI wrote to the grand master denouncing the luxury of the order and the misuse of its funds; in 1355 Innocent VI sent the celebrated Juan Fernandez de Heredia, castellan of Amposta and grand commander of Aragon, as his legate to Rhodes, armed with a bull which threatened the order with dissolution if it did not reform itself and effect a settlement in Turkey. In 1348, indeed, the Hospitallers, in alliance with Venice and Cyprus, had captured Smyrna; but the chief outcome of this had been commercial treaties with their allies. Such treaties were, in fact, a matter of life and death; for the island was not self-supporting, and even towards the Infidel the attitude of the knights was necessarily influenced by the fact that their supplies of provisions were mainly drawn from the Mussulman mainland. By the 15th century their crusading spirit had grown so weak that they even attempted to negotiate a commercial treaty with the Ottoman sultan; the project broke down on the refusal of the knights to accept the sultan's suzerainty.

The earlier history of the Hospitallers bristles with obscure questions on which modern scholarship (notably the labours of Delaville Le Roulx) has thrown new light. From 1355 onward, however, the case is different; the essential facts have been established by writers who were able to draw on a mass of well-ordered materials.

Their history during the two centuries of the occupation of Rhodes, so far as its general interest for Europe is concerned, is that of a long series of naval attacks and counter-attacks; its chief outcome, for which the European states owed a debt of gratitude but ill acknowledged, the postponement for some two centuries of the appearance of the Ottomans as a first-rate naval power in the Mediterranean. The seaward advance of Osman the Turk was arrested by their victories; in 1358 they successfully defended Smyrna; in 1365 under their grand master Raymond Beranger (d. 1374), and in alliance with the king of Cyprus, they captured and burned Alexandria. The Ottoman peril, however, grew ever more imminent, and in 1395, under their grand master Philibert de Naillac, the Hospitallers shared in the disastrous defeat of Nicopolis. The invasion followed of Timur the Tatar, invited to his aid by the Eastern emperor. Sultan Bayezid, the victor of Nicopolis, was overthrown; but Timur turned against the Christians and in 1402 captured Smyrna, putting the Hospitallers who defended it to the sword. It was after this disaster that the knights built, on a narrow promontory jutting from the mainland opposite the island of Kos, the fortress of St Peter the Liberator. The castle, which still stands, its name corrupted into Budrun (from Bedros, Peter), was long a place of refuge for Christians flying from slavery. Some years later the position of the order as a Mediterranean sea-power was strengthened by commercial treaties with Venice, Pisa, Genoa, and even with Egypt (1423). The zenith of its power was reached a few years later, when, under the grand master Jean Bonpar de Lastic, it twice defeated an Egyptian attack by sea (1440 and 1444). A new and more imminent peril, however, arose with the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, for Mahommed II had announced his intention of making Rhodes his next objective. The attack was delayed for twenty-seven years by the sultan's wars in south-eastern Europe; and meanwhile, in 1476, Pierre d'Aubusson, the second great hero of the order, had been elected grand master. Under his inspiration, when in June 1480 the Turks, led by three renegades, attacked the island, the knights made so gallant a resistance that, in July, after repeated and decisive repulses, the Turks retreated. In 1503 Pierre d'Aubusson was succeeded by Aymar d'Amboise, who directed a long series of naval battles. In 1521 the famous Philippe de Villiers de l'Isle d'Adam was elected grand master, just as the dreaded sultan Suleiman the Magnificent directed his attack on Rhodes. In 1522 he besieged the island, reinforcements failed, the European powers sent no assistance, and in 1523 the knights capitulated, and withdrew with all the honours of war to Candia (Crete). The emperor Charles V, when the news was brought to him, exclaimed, "Nothing in the world has been so well lost as Rhodes!" But he refused to assist the grand master in his plans for its recovery, and instead, five years later (1530), handed over to the Hospitallers the island of Malta and the fortress of Tripoli in Africa.

The Knights in Malta.—The settlement of the Hospitallers in Malta was contemporaneous with the Reformation, which profoundly affected the order. The master and knights of the bailiwick of Brandenburg accepted the reformed religion, without, however, breaking off all connexion with the order (see below). In England, on the other hand, the refusal of the grand prior and knights to acknowledge the royal supremacy led to the confiscation of their estates by Henry VIII, and, though not formally suppressed, the English "langue" practically ceased to exist. The knights of Malta, as they came to be known, none the less continued their vigorous warfare. Under Pierre du Pont, who succeeded Villiers de 1'Isle d'Adam in 1534, they took a conspicuous part in Charles V's attack on Goletta and Tunis (1535). In 1550 they defeated the redoubtable corsair Dragut, but in 1551 their position in Tripoli, always precarious, became untenable and they capitulated to the Turks under Dragut, concentrating their forces in Malta. In 1557 Jean Parisot de la Vallette (1494-1548) was elected grand master, and under his vigorous rule strenuous efforts were made to put the defences of Malta into a fit state to resist the expected Turkish attack. On the 18th of May 1565 the Ottoman fleet, under Dragut, appeared before the city, and one of the most famous sieges in history began. It was ultimately raised on the 8th of September, on the appearance of a large relieving force despatched by the Spanish viceroy of Sicily, after Dragut and 25,000 of his followers had fallen. The memory of La Vallette, the hero of the siege, who died in 1568, is preserved in the city of Valletta, which was built on the site of the struggle.

In 1571 the knights shared in the victory of Lepanto; but this crowning success was followed during the 17th century by a long period of depression, due to internal dissensions and culminating during the Thirty Years' War, the position of the order being seriously affected by the terms of the peace of Westphalia (1648). The order was also troubled by quarrels with the popes, who claimed to nominate its officials (a claim renounced by Innocent XII in 1697), and by rivalry with the Mediterranean powers, especially Venice. In Malta itself there were four rival claimants to independent jurisdiction: the grand master, the bishop of Malta, the grand inquisitor, whose office was instituted in 1572, and the Society of Jesus, introduced by Bishop Gargallo in 1592. The order, indeed, saw much fighting: e.g. the frequent expeditions undertaken during the grand-mastership of Alof de Vignacourt (1601-1622); the defence of Candia which fell after a twenty years' siege in 1669 under Nicholas Cottoner, grand master from 1665 to 1680; and, during the grand mastership of Gregorio Caraffa (1680-1690), a campaign (1683) with John Sobieski, king of Poland, against the Turks in Hungary, and the attack in alliance with Venice on the Morea in 1687, which involved the Hospitallers in the defeat at Negropont in 1689. The decline of the order was hastened by the practice of electing aged grand masters to ensure frequent vacancies; such were Luiz Mendez de Vasconcellos (1622-1623) and Antonio da Paula (1623-1636) and Giovanni Paolo Lascaris (de Castellar), in 1636, who died twenty-one years later at the age of ninety-seven. The character of the order at this date became more exclusively aristocratic, and its wealth, partly acquired by commerce, partly derived from the contributions of the commanderies scattered throughout Europe, was enormous. The wonderful fortifications, planned by French architects and improved by every grand master in turn, the gorgeous churches, chapels and auberges, the great library founded in 1650, were the outward and visible sign of the growth of a corresponding luxury in the private life of the order. Nevertheless, under Raymond Perellos de Roccaful (1697-1720) and Antonio Manoel de Vilhena (1722-1736), the knights restored their prestige in the Mediterranean by victories over the Turks. In 1741 Emmanuele Pinto de Fonseca, a man of strong character, became grand master. He expelled the Jesuits, resisted papal encroachments on his authority and, refusing to summon the general chapter, ruled as a despot.

Emanuel, prince de Rohan, who was elected grand master in succession to Francesco Jimenes de Texada in 1775, made serious efforts to revive the old spirit of the order. Under him, for the first time since 1603, a general chapter was convoked; the orders of St Anthony and St Lazarus were incorporated, and the statutes were revised and codified (1782). In 1782 also Rohan, with the approval of George III established the new Anglo-Bavarian "langue." The last great expedition of the Maltese galleys was worthy of the noblest traditions of the order; they were sent to carry supplies for the sufferers from the great earthquake in Sicily. They had long ceased to be effective fighting ships, and survived mainly as gorgeous state barges in which the knights sailed on ceremonial pleasure trips.

The French Revolution was fatal to the order. Rohan made no secret of his sympathy with the losing cause in France, and Malta became a refuge-place for the émigrés. In 1792 the vast possessions of the order in France were confiscated, and six years later the Directory resolved on the forcible seizure of Malta itself. Rohan had died in 1797, and his feeble successor, Baron Ferdinand von Hompesch, though fully warned, made no preparations to resist. In the early summer of 1798, after a siege of only a few days, he surrendered the island, with its impregnable fortifications, to Bonaparte, and retired ignominiously to Trieste, carrying with him the precious relics of the order—the hand of St John the Baptist presented by the sultan Bayezid, the miraculous image of Our Lady of Philermo, and a fragment of the true cross.

With this the history of the order of St John practically ends. Efforts were, however, made to preserve it. Many of the knights had taken refuge at the court of Paul I of Russia, with whom in 1797 Hompesch had made an alliance. In October 1798 these elected the emperor Paul grand master, and in the following year Hompesch was induced to resign in his favour. The half-mad tsar took his new functions very seriously, but his murder in 1801 ruined any hope of recovering Malta with Russian assistance. A chapter of the order now granted the right of nomination to the pope, who appointed Giovanni di Tommasi grand master. From his death in 1805 until 1879, when Leo XIII restored the title of grand master in favour of Fra Giovanni Ceschi a Santa Croce, the heads of the order received only the title of lieutenant master. In 1814 the French knights summoned a chapter general and elected a permanent commission for the government of the order, which was recognized by the Italian and Spanish knights, by the pope and by King Louis XVIII. In the Italian states much of the property of the order was restored at the instance of Austria, and in 1841 the emperor Ferdinand founded the grand priory of Lombardo-Venetia.

LOMBARDS, or LANGOBARDI, a Suevic people who appear to have inhabited the lower basin of the Elbe and whose name is believed to survive in the modern Bardengau to the south of Hamburg. They are first mentioned in connexion with the year A.D. 5, at which time they were defeated by the Romans under Tiberius, afterwards emperor. In A.D. 9, however, after the destruction of Varus's army, the Romans gave up their attempt to extend their frontier to the Elbe. At first, with most of the Suevic tribes, they were subject to the hegemony of Maroboduus, king of the Marcomanni, but they revolted from him in his war with Arminius, chief of the Cherusci, in the year 17. We again hear of their interference in the dynastic strife of the Cherusci some time after the year 47. From this time they are not mentioned until the year 165, when a force of Langobardi, in alliance with the Marcomanni, was defeated by the Romans, apparently on the Danubian frontier. It has been inferred from this incident that the Langobardi had already moved southwards, but the force mentioned may very well have been sent from the old home of the tribe, as the various Suevic peoples seem generally to have preserved some form of political union. From this time onwards we hear no more of them until the end of the 5th century.

In their own traditions we are told that the Langobardi were originally called Winnili and dwelt in an island named Scadinavia (with this story compare that of the Gothic migration, see GOTHS). Thence they set out under the leadership of Ibor and Aio, the sons of a prophetess called Gambara, and came into conflict with the Vandals. The leaders of the latter prayed to Wodan for victory, while Gambara and her sons invoked Frea. Wodan promised to give victory to those whom he should see in front of him at sunrise. Frea directed the Winnili to bring their women with their hair let down round their faces like beards and turned Wodan's couch round so that he faced them. When Wodan awoke at sunrise he saw the host of the Winnili and said, "Qui sunt isti Longibarbi ?"—"Who are these long-beards?"—and Frea replied, "As thou hast given them the name, give them also the victory." They conquered in the battle and were thenceforth known as Langobardi. After this they are said to have wandered through regions which cannot now be identified, apparently between the Elbe and the Oder, under legendary kings, the first of whom was Agilmund, the son of Aio.

Shortly before the end of the 5th century the Langobardi appear to have taken possession of the territories formerly occupied by the Rugii whom Odoacer had overthrown in 487, a region which probably included the present province of Lower Austria. At this time they were subject to Rodulf, king of the Heruli, who, however, took up arms against them; according to one story, owing to the treacherous murder of Rodulf's brother, according to another through an irresistible desire for fighting on the part of his men. The result was the total defeat of the Heruli by the Langobardi under their king Tato and the death of Rodulf at some date between 493 and 508. By this time the Langobardi are said to have adopted Christianity in its Arian form. Tato was subsequently killed by his nephew Waccho. The latter reigned for thirty years, though frequent attempts were made by Ildichis, a son or grandson of Tato, to recover the throne. Waccho is said to have conquered the Suabi, possibly the Bavarians, and he was also involved in strife with the Gepidae, with whom Ildichis had taken refuge. He was succeeded by his youthful son Walthari, who reigned only seven years under the guardianship of a certain Audoin. On Walthari's death (about 546 ?) Audoin succeeded. He also was involved in hostilities with the Gepidae, whose support of Ildichis he repaid by protecting Ustrogotthus, a rival of their king Thorisind. In these quarrels both nations aimed at obtaining the support of the emperor Justinian, who, in pursuance of his policy of playing off one against the other, invited the Langobardi into Noricum and Pannonia, where they now settled.

A large force of Lombards under Audoin fought on the imperial side at the battle of the Apennines against the Ostrogothic king Totila in 553, but the assistance of Justinian, though often promised, had no effect on the relations of the two nations, which were settled for the moment after a series of truces by the victory of the Langobardi, probably in 554. The resulting peace was sealed by the murder of Ildichis and Ustrogotthus, and the Langobardi seem to have continued inactive until the death of Audoin, perhaps in 565, and the accession of his son Alboin, who had won a great reputation in the wars with the Gepidae. It was about this time that the Avars, under their first Chagun Baian, entered Europe, and with them Alboin is said to have made an alliance against the Gepidae under their new king Cunimund. The Avars, however, did not take part in the final battle, in which the Langobardi were completely victorious. Alboin, who had slain Cunimund in the battle, now took Rosamund, daughter of the dead king, to be his wife.

In 568 Alboin and the Langobardi, in accordance with a compact made with Baian, which is recorded by Menander, abandoned their old homes to the Avars and passed southwards into Italy, were they were destined to found a new and mighty kingdom.

The Lombard Kingdom in Italy.—In 568 Alboin, king of the Langobards, with the women and children of the tribe and all their possessions, with Saxon allies, with the subject tribe of the Gepidae and a mixed host of other barbarians, descended into Italy by the great plain at the head of the Adriatic. The war which had ended in the downfall of the Goths had exhausted Italy; it was followed by famine and pestilence; and the government at Constantinople made but faint efforts to retain the province which Belisarius and Narses had recovered for it. Except in a few fortified places, such as Ticinum or Pavia, the Italians did not venture to encounter the new invaders; and, though Alboin was not without generosity, the Lombards, wherever resisted, justified the opinion of their ferocity by the savage cruelty of the invasion. In 572, according to the Lombard chronicler, Alboin fell a victim to the revenge of his wife Rosamund, the daughter of the king of the Gepidae, whose skull Alboin had turned into a drinking cup, out of which he forced Rosamund to drink. By this time the Langobards had established themselves in the north of Italy. Chiefs were placed, or placed themselves, first in the border cities, like Friuli and Trent, which commanded the north-eastern passes, and then in other principal places; and this arrangement became characteristic of the Lombard settlement. The principal-seat of the settlement was the rich plain watered by the Po and its affluents, which was in future to receive its name from them; but their power extended across the Apennines into Liguria and Tuscany, and then southwards to the outlying dukedoms of Spoleto and Benevento. The invaders failed to secure any maritime ports or any territory that was conveniently commanded from the sea. Ticinum (Pavia), the one place which had obstinately resisted Alboin, became the seat of their kings.

After the short and cruel reign of Cleph, the successor of Alboin, the Lombards (as we may begin for convenience sake to call them) tried for ten years the experiment of a national confederacy of their dukes (as, after the Latin writers, their chiefs are styled), without any king. It was the rule of some thirty-five or thirty-six petty tyrants, under whose oppression and private wars even the invaders suffered. With anarchy among themselves and so precarious a hold on the country, hated by the Italian population and by the Catholic clergy, threatened also by an alliance of the Greek empire with their persistent rivals the Franks beyond the Alps, they resolved to sacrifice their independence and elect a king. In 584 they chose Authari, the grandson of Alboin, and endowed the royal domain with a half of their possessions. From this time till the fall of the Lombard power before the arms of their rivals the Franks under Charles the Great, the kingly rule continued. Authari, "the Long-haired," with his Roman title of Flavius, marks the change from the war king of an invading host to the permanent representative of the unity and law of the nation, and the increased power of the crown, by the possession of a great domain, to enforce its will. The independence of the dukes was surrendered to the king. The dukedoms in the neighbourhood of the seat of power were gradually absorbed, and their holders transformed into royal officers. Those of the northern marches, Trent and Friuli, with the important dukedom of Turin, retained longer the kind of independence which marchlands usually give where invasion is to be feared. The great dukedom of Benevento in the south, with its neighbour Spoleto, threatened at one time to be a separate principality, and even to the last resisted, with varying success, the full claims of the royal authority at Pavia.

The kingdom of the Lombards lasted more than two hundred years, from Alboin (568) to the fall of Desiderius (774)—much longer than the preceding Teutonic kingdom of Theodoric and the Goths. But it differed from the other Teutonic conquests in Gaul, in Britain, in Spain. It was never complete in point of territory: there were always two, and almost to the last three, capitals—the Lombard one, Pavia; the Latin one, Rome; the Greek one, Ravenna; and the Lombards never could get access to the sea. And it never was complete over the subject race: it profoundly affected the Italians of the north; in its turn it was entirely transformed by contact with them; but the Lombards never amalgamated with the Italians till their power as a ruling race was crushed by the victory given to the Roman element by the restored empire of the Franks. The Langobards, German in their faults and in their strength, but coarser, at least at first, than the Germans whom the Italians had known, the Goths of Theodoric and Totila, found themselves continually in the presence of a subject population very different from anything which the other Teutonic conquerors met with among the provincials like them, exhausted, dispirited, unwarlike, but with the remains and memory of a great civilization round them, intelligent, subtle, sensitive, feeling themselves infinitely superior in experience and knowledge to the rough barbarians whom they could not fight, and capable of hatred such as only cultivated races can nourish. The Lombards who, after they had occupied the lands and cities of Upper Italy, still went on sending forth furious bands to plunder and destroy where they did not care to stay, never were able to overcome the mingled fear and scorn and loathing of the Italians. They adapted themselves very quickly indeed to many Italian fashions. Within thirty years of the invasions, Authari took the imperial title of Flavius, even while his bands were leading Italian captives in leash like dogs under the walls of Rome, and under the eyes of Pope Gregory; and it was retained by his successors. They soon became Catholics; and then in all the usages of religion, in church building, in founding monasteries, in their veneration for relics, they vied with Italians. Authari's queen, Theodelinda, solemnly placed the Lombard nation under the patronage of St John the Baptist, and at Monza she built in his honour the first Lombard church, and the royal palace near it. King Liutprand (712-744) bought the relics of St Augustine for a large sum to be placed in his church at Pavia. Their Teutonic speech disappeared; except in names and a few technical words all traces of it are lost. But to the last they had the unpardonable crime of being a ruling barbarian race or caste in Italy. To the end they are "nefandissimi," execrable, loathsome, filthy. So wrote Gregory the Great when they first appeared. So wrote Pope Stephen IV, at the end of their rule, when stirring up the kings of the Franks to destroy them.

Authari's short reign (584-591) was one of renewed effort for conquest. It brought the Langobards face to face, not merely with the emperors at Constantinople, but with the first of the great statesmen popes, Gregory the Great (590-604). But Lombard conquest was bungling and wasteful; when they had spoiled a city they proceeded to tear down its walls and raze it to the ground. Authari's chief connexion with the fortunes of his people was an important, though an accidental one. The Lombard chronicler tells a romantic tale of the way in which Authari sought his bride from Garibald, duke of the Bavarians, how he went incognito in the embassy to judge of her attractions, and how she recognized her disguised suitor. The bride was the Christian Theodelinda, and she became to the Langobards what Bertha was to the Anglo-Saxons and Clotilda to the Franks. She became the mediator between the Lombards and the Catholic Church. Authari, who had brought her to Italy, died shortly after his marriage. But Theodelinda had so won on the Lombard chiefs that they bid her as queen choose the one among them whom she would have for her husband and for king. She chose Agilulf, duke of Turin (592-615). He was not a true Langobard, but a Thuringian. It was the beginning of peace between the Lombards and the Catholic clergy. Agilulf could not abandon his traditional Arianism, and he was a very uneasy neighbour, not only to the Greek exarch, but to Rome itself. But he was favourably disposed both to peace and to the Catholic Church. Gregory interfered to prevent a national conspiracy against the Langobards, like that of St Brice's day in England against the Danes, or that later uprising against the French, the Sicilian Vespers. He was right both in point of humanity and of policy. The Arian and Catholic bishops went on for a time side by side; but the Lombard kings and clergy rapidly yielded to the religious influences around them, even while the national antipathies continued unabated and vehement. Gregory, who despaired of any serious effort on the part of the Greek emperors to expel the Lombards, endeavoured to promote peace between the Italians and Agilulf; and, in spite of the feeble hostility of the exarchs of Ravenna, the pope and the king of the Lombards became the two real powers in the north and centre of Italy. Agilulf was followed, after two unimportant reigns, by his son-in-law, the husband of Theodelinda's daughter, King Rothari (636-652), the Lombard legislator, still an Arian though he favoured the Catholics. He was the first of their kings who collected their customs under the name of laws and he did this, not in their own Teutonic dialect, but in Latin. The use of Latin implies that the laws were to be not merely the personal law of the Lombards, but the law of the land, binding on Lombards and Romans alike. But such rude legislation could not provide for all questions arising even in the decayed state of Roman civilization. It is probable that among themselves the Italians kept to their old usages and legal precedents where they were not overridden by the conquerors' law, and by degrees a good many of the Roman civil arrangements made their way into the Lombard code, while all ecclesiastical ones, and they were a large class, were untouched by it.

From Rothari (d. 652) to Liutprand (712-744) the Lombard kings, succeeding one another in the irregular fashion of the time, sometimes by descent, sometimes by election, sometimes by conspiracy and violence, strove fitfully to enlarge their boundaries, and contended with the aristocracy of dukes inherent in the original organization of the nation, an element which, though much weakened, always embarrassed the power of the crown, and checked the unity of the nation. Their old enemies the Franks on the west, and the Slavs or Huns, ever ready to break in on the north-east, and sometimes called in by mutinous and traitorous dukes of Friuli and Trent, were constant and serious dangers. By the popes, who represented Italian interests, they were always looked upon with dislike and jealousy, even when they had become zealous Catholics, the founders of churches and monasteries; with the Greek empire there was chronic war. From time to time they made raids into the unsubdued parts of Italy, and added a city or two to their dominions. But there was no sustained effort for the complete subjugation of Italy till Liutprand, the most powerful of the line. He tried it, and failed. He broke up the independence of the great southern duchies, Benevento and Spoleto. For a time, in the heat of the dispute about images, he won the pope to his side against the Greeks. For a time, but only for a time, he deprived the Greeks of Ravenna. Aistulf, his successor, carried on the same policy. He even threatened Rome itself, and claimed a capitation tax. But the popes, thoroughly irritated and alarmed, and hopeless of aid from the East, turned to the family which was rising into power among the Franks of the West, the mayors of the palace of Austrasia. Pope Gregory III applied in vain to Charles Martel. But with his successors Pippin and Charles the popes were more successful. In return for the transfer by the pope of the Frank crown from the decayed line of Clovis to his own, Pippin crossed the Alps, defeated Aistulf and gave to the pope the lands which Aistulf had torn from the empire, Ravenna and the Pentapolis (754-756). But the angry quarrels still went on between the popes and the Lombards. The Lombards were still to the Italians a "foul and horrid" race. At length, invited by Pope Adrian I, Pippin's son Charlemagne once more descended into Italy. As the Lombard kingdom began, so it ended, with a siege of Pavia. Desiderius, the last king, became a prisoner (774), and the Lombard power perished. Charlemagne, with the title of king of the Franks and Lombards, became master of Italy, and in 800 the pope, who had crowned Pippin king of the Franks, claimed to bestow the Roman empire, and crowned his greater son emperor of the Romans (800).

Effects of the Carolingian Conquest.—To Italy the overthrow of the Lombard kings was the loss of its last chance of independence and unity. To the Lombards the conquest was the destruction of their legal and social supremacy. Henceforth they were equally with the Italians the subjects of the Frank kings. The Carolingian kings expressly recognized the Roman law, and allowed all who would be counted Romans to "profess" it. But Latin influences were not strong enough to extinguish the Lombard name and destroy altogether the recollections and habits of the Lombard rule; Lombard law was still recognized, and survived in the schools of Pavia. Lombardy remained the name of the finest province of Italy, and for a time was the name for Italy itself But what was specially Lombard could not stand in the long run against the Italian atmosphere which surrounded it. Generation after generation passed more and more into real Italians. Antipathies, indeed, survived, and men even in the 10th century called each other Roman or Langobard as terms of reproach. But the altered name of Lombard also denoted henceforth some of the proudest of Italians; and, though the Lombard speech had utterly perished their most common names still kept up the remembrance that their fathers had come from beyond the Alps.

But the establishment of the Frank kingdom, and still more the re-establishment of the Christian empire as the source of law and jurisdiction in Christendom, had momentous influence on the history of the Italianized Lombards. The Empire was the counterweight to the local tyrannies into which the local authorities established by the Empire itself, the feudal powers, judicial and military, necessary for the purposes of government, invariably tended to degenerate. When they became intolerable, from the Empire were sought the exemptions, privileges, immunities from that local authority, which, anomalous and anarchical as they were in theory, yet in fact were the foundations of all the liberties of the middle ages in the Swiss cantons, in the free towns of Germany and the Low Countries, in the Lombard cities of Italy. Italy was and ever has been a land of cities; and, ever since the downfall of Rome and the decay of the municipal system, the bishops of the cities had really been at the head of the peaceful and industrial part of their population, and were a natural refuge for the oppressed, and sometimes for the mutinous and the evil doers, from the military and civil powers of the duke or count or judge, too often a rule of cruelty or fraud. Under the Carolingian empire, a vast system grew up in the North Italian cities of episcopal "immunities," by which a city with its surrounding district was removed, more or less completely, from the jurisdiction of the ordinary authority, military or civil, and placed under that of the bishop. These "immunities" led to the temporal sovereignty of the bishops; under it the spirit of liberty grew more readily than under the military chief. Municipal organization, never quite forgotten, naturally revived under new forms, and with its "consuls" at the head of the citizens, with its "arts "and "crafts" and "gilds," grew up secure under the shadow of the church. In due time the city populations, free from the feudal yoke, and safe within the walls which in many instances the bishops had built for them, became impatient also of the bishop's government. The cities which the bishops had made thus independent of the dukes and counts next sought to be free from the bishops; in due time they too gained their charters of privilege and liberty. Left to take care of themselves, islands in a sea of turbulence, they grew in the sense of self-reliance and independence; they grew also to be aggressive, quarrelsome and ambitious. Thus, by the 11th century, the Lombard cities had become "communes," commonalties, republics, managing their own affairs, and ready for attack or defence. Milan had recovered its greatness, ecclesiastically as well as politically; it scarcely bowed to Rome, and it aspired to the position of a sovereign city, mistress over its neighbours. At length, in the I2th century, the inevitable conflict came between the republicanism of the Lombard cities and the German feudalism which still claimed their allegiance in the name of the Empire. Leagues and counterleagues were formed; and a confederacy of cities, with Milan at its head, challenged the strength of Germany under one of its sternest emperors, Frederick Barbarossa. At first Frederick was victorious; Milan, except its churches, was utterly destroyed; everything that marked municipal independence was abolished in the "rebel" cities; and they had to receive an imperial magistrate instead of their own (1158-1162). But the Lombard league was again formed. Milan was rebuilt, with the help even of its jealous rivals, and at Legnano (1176) Frederick was utterly defeated. The Lombard cities had regained their independence; and at the peace of Constance (1183) Frederick found himself compelled to confirm it.

MEROVINGIANS, the name given to the first dynasty which reigned over the kingdom of the Franks. The name is taken from Merovech, one of the first kings of the Salian Franks, who succeeded to Clodio in the middle of the 5th century, and soon became the centre of many legends. The chronicler known as Fredegarius Scholasticus relates that a queen was once sitting by the seashore, when a monster came out of the sea, and by this monster she subsequently became the mother of Merovech, but this myth is due to an attempt to explain the hero's name, which means "the sea-born." At the great battle of Mauriac (the Catalaunian fields) in which Aetius cheked the invasion of the Huns (451), there were present in the Roman army a number of Frankish foederati, and a later document, the Vita lupa, states that Merovech (Merovaeus) was their leader. Merovech was the father of Chilperic I (457-481), and grandfather of Clovis (481-511), under whom the Salian Franks conquered the whole of Gaul, except the kingdom of Burgundy, Provence and Septimania. The sons of Clovis divided the dominions of their father between them, made themselves masters of Burgundy (532), and in addition received Provence from the Ostrogoths (535); Septimania was not taken from the Arabs till the time of Pippin, the founder of the Carolingian dynasty. From the death of Clovis to that of Dagobert (639), the Merovingian kings displayed considerable energy, both in their foreign wars and in the numerous wars against one another in which they found an outlet for their barbarian instincts. After 639, however, the race began to decline, one after another the kings succeeded to the throne, but none of them reached more than the age of twenty or twenty-five; this was the age of the "rois fainéants." Henceforth the real sovereign was the mayor of the palace. The mayors of the palace belonging to the Carolingian family were able to keep the throne vacant for long periods of time, and finally, in 751 the mayor Pippin, with the consent of the pope Zacharias, sent King Childeric III to the monastery of St Omer, and shut up his young son Thierry in that of St Wandrille. The Merovingian race thus came to an end in the cloister.

NAVARRE (Span. Navarra), an inland province of northern Spain, and formerly a kingdom which included part of France. The province is bounded on the N. by France (Basses Pyrénées) and Guipúzcoa, E. by Huesca and Saragossa, S. by Saragossa and Logroño and W. by Álava. It is traversed from east to west by the Pyrenees and the Cantabrian Mountains, and almost the whole of the province is overrun by the ramifications of these ranges. From Navarre there are only three practicable roads for carriages into France—those by the Puerta de Vera, the Puerta de Maya and Roncesvalles. The highest summit in the province is the Monte Adi (4931 ft.). The chief river flowing towards the Atlantic is the Bidasoa, which rises near the Puerta de Maya, and after flowing southwards through the valley of Baztán takes a north-easterly course, and for a short distance above its outfall at Fuenterrabia constitutes the frontier between France and Spain (Guipúzcoa); by far the larger portion of Navarre is drained to the Mediterranean through the Ebro, which flows along the western frontier and crosses the extreme south of the province. The hilly districts consist almost entirely of forest and pasture, the most common trees being the pine, beech, oak and chestnut. Much of the lower ground is well adapted for agriculture, and yields grain in abundance; the principal fruit grown is the apple, from which cider is made in some districts; hemp, flax and oil are also produced, and mulberries are cultivated for silkworms. The wine trade is active, and the products of the vineyards are in great demand in south-west France and at Passages in Guipúzcoa for mixing with French wines. Navarre is one of the richest provinces of Spain in live stock. Game, both large and small, is plentiful in the mountains, and the streams abound with trout and other fish. Gypsum, limestone, freestone and marble are quarried; there are also mines of copper, lead, iron, zinc and rock salt. Mineral and thermal springs are numerous, but none is of more than local fame. The other industries include manufactures of arms, paper, chocolate, candles, alcohol, leather, coarse linens and cloth. The exports both by rail and by the passes in the Pyrenees consist of live stock, oil, wine, wool, leather and paper.

The Ebro Valley railway, which traverses southern Navarre and skirts the western frontier, sends out a branch line from Castejon to Pamplona and Alsasua junction, where it connects with the Northern railways from Madrid to France. Narrow-gauge railways convey timber and ore from the mountains to these main lines. Pamplona, the capital (pop., 1900, 28,886), and Tudela (9449) are described in separate articles. The only other towns with more than 5000 inhabitants are Baztán (9234), Corella (6793), Estella (5736) and Tafalla (5494).

History.—The kingdom of Navarre was formed out of a part of the territory occupied by the Vascones, i.e. the Basques and Gascons, who occupied the southern slope of the western Pyrenees and part of the shore of the Bay of Biscay. In the course of the 6th century there was a considerable emigration of Basques to the north of the Pyrenees. The cause is supposed to have been the pressure put upon them by the attacks of the Visigoth kings in Spain. Yet the Basques maintained their independence. The name of Navarre is derived by etymologists from "nava" a flat valley surrounded by hills (a commonplace name in Spain; cf. Navas de Tolosa to the south of the Sierra Morena) and "erri" a region or country. It began to appear as the name of part of Vasconia towards the end of the Visigoth epoch in Spain in the 7th century. Its early history is more than obscure. In recent times ingenious attempts have been made to trace the descent of the first historic king of Navarre from one Semen Lupus, duke of Aquitaine in the 6th century. The reader may consult La Vasconie by Jean de Jaurgain (Paris, 1898) for the latest example of this reconstruction of ancient history from fragmentary and dubious materials. Jaurgain has been subjected to very damaging criticism by L. Barrau-Dihigo (Revue Hispanique, t. vii. 141). The first historic king of Navarre was Sancho Garcia, who ruled at Pamplona in the early years of the 10th century. Under him and his immediate successors Navarre reached the height of its power and its extension. When the kingdom was at its height it included all the modern province of the name; the northern slope of the western Pyrenees called by the Spaniards the "Ultra-puertos" or country beyond the passes, and now known as French Navarre; the Basque provinces; the Bureba, the valley between the Basque Mountains and the Monies de Oca to the north of Burgos; the Rioja and Tarazona in the upper valley of the Ebro. In the 12th century the kings of Castile gradually annexed the Rioja and Álava. While Navarre was reunited to Aragon—1076-1134—it was saved from aggression on the east, but did not recover the territory taken by Castile. About the year 1200 Alfonso VIII of Castile annexed the other two Basque provinces, Biscay (Vizcaya) and Guipúzcoa. Tarazona remained in possession of Aragon. After 1234 Navarre, though the crown was claimed by the kings of Aragon, passed by marriage to a succession of French rulers. In 1516 Spanish Navarre was finally annexed by Ferdinand the Catholic. French Navarre survived as an independent little kingdom till it was united to the crown of France by Henry IV founder of the Bourbon dynasty. From 1510 until 1833, when it was fully incorporated with Spain, Navarre was a viceroyalty.

NEVERS, a town of central France, capital of the department of Nièvre, 159 m. S.S.E. of Paris by the Paris-Lyons-Méditerranée railway to Nîmes. Pop. (1906) 23,561. Nevers is situated on the slope of a hill on the right bank of the Loire at its confluence with the Nièvre. Narrow winding streets lead from the quay through the town where there are numerous old houses of the 14th to the 17th centuries. Among the ecclesiastical buildings the most important is the cathedral of St Cyr, which is a combination of two buildings, and possesses two apses. The apse and transept at the west end are the remains of a Romanesque church, while the nave and eastern apse are in the Gothic style and belong to the 14th century. There is no transept at the eastern end. The lateral portal on the south side belongs to the late 15th century; the massive and elaborately decorated tower which rises beside it to the early 16th century. The church of St Étienne is a specimen of the Romanesque style of Auvergne of which the disposition of the apse with its three radiating chapels is characteristic. It was consecrated at the close of the 11th century, and belonged to a priory affiliated to Cluny. The ducal palace at Nevers (now occupied by the courts of justice and an important ceramic museum) was built in the 15th and 16th centuries and is one of the principal feudal edifices in central France. The facade is flanked at each end by a turret and a round tower. A middle tower containing the great staircase has its windows adorned by sculptures relating to the history of the house of Clèves by the members of which the greater part of the palace was built. In front of the palace lies a wide open space with a fine view over the valley of the Loire. The Porte du Croux, a square tower, with corner turrets, dating from the end of the 14th century, is among the remnants of the old fortifications; it now contains a collection of sculptures and Roman antiquities. A triumphal arch of the 18th century, commemorating the victory of Fontenoy and the hôtel de ville, a modern building which contains the library, are of some interest. The Loire is crossed by a modern stone bridge, and by an iron railway bridge. Nevers is the seat of a bishopric, of tribunals of first instance and of commerce and of a court of assizes and has a chamber of commerce and a branch of the Bank of France. Its educational institutions include a lycée, a training college for female teachers, ecclesiastical seminaries and a school of art. The town manufactures porcelain, agricultural implements, chemical manures, glue, boilers and iron goods, boots and shoes and fur garments, and has distilleries, tanneries and dye-works. Its trade is in iron and steel, wood, wine, grain, live-stock, &c. Hydraulic lime, kaolin and clay for the manufacture of faience are worked in the vicinity.

Noviodunum, the early name of Nevers was in later times altered to Nebirnum. The quantities of medals and other Roman antiquities found on the site indicate the importance of the place at the time when Caesar chose it as a military depôt for corn, money and hostages. In 52 B.C. it was the first place seized by the revolting Aedui. It became the seat of a bishopric at the end of the 5th century. The countship (see below) dates at least from the beginning of the 10th century. The citizens of Nevers obtained charters in 1194 and in 1231. For a short time in the 14th century the town was the seat of a university, transferred from Orleans, to which it was restored.

COUNTS AND DUKES OF NEVERS. Having formed part of the duchy of Burgundy, the county of Nevers (Nivernais) was given by Duke Henry I in 987 to his stepson, Otto William, afterwards count of Mâcon, who five years later handed it over to his son-in-law Landri. The first house of the hereditary counts of Nevers originated in this Landri, and was brought to an end in 1192 by the death of Agnes, countess of Nevers, wife of Pierre de Courtenay (d. 1217). The county subsequently passed by successive marriages into the houses of Donzy, Châtillon and Bourbon. Mahaut de Bourbon brought the county of Nevers, together with those of Auxerre and Tonnerre, to her husband Odo (Eudes), son of Hugh IV, duke of Burgundy, in 1248. Her eldest daughter, Yoland, received the county of Nevers as her dowry when in 1265 she married Jean Tristan, son of King Louis IX. She became a widow in 1270, and in 1272 married Robert de Dampierre, who became count of Flanders. Her descendant by her second marriage, Marguerite, daughter and heiress of Louis II de Male, count of Flanders, married successively two dukes of Burgundy, Philip I de Rouvre and Philip II the Bold. Philip (d. 1415), the third son of Philip the Bold, received the counties of Nevers and of Rethel and the barony of Donzy; his last male descendant, John, died in 1491. The house of Cleves then inherited the Nivernais, which was erected into a duchy by King Francis I for Francis of Cleves in 1539. In 1565 Louis de Gonzaga (d. 1595), son of Frederick II, duke of Mantua, married Henrietta of Cleves, duchess of Nevers, and one of his descendants, Charles (d. 1665), sold the Nivernais to Cardinal Mazarin in 1659. The cardinal devised it to his nephew Philippe Jules Mancini, whose descendants possessed it until the French Revolution. The last duke of Nivernais, Louis Jules Barbon Mancini Mazarini, died in 1798.

ORLEANS, DUKES OF. The title of duke of Orleans was first created by King Philip VI in favour of his son Philip, who died without legitimate issue in 1375. The second duke of Orleans, created in 1392, was Louis, a younger son of Charles V, whose heir was his son, the poet Charles of Orleans. Charles's son Louis, the succeeding duke, became king of France as Louis XII in 1498, when the duchy of Orleans was united with the royal domain. In 1626 Louis XIII created his brother, Jean Baptiste Gaston, duke of Orleans, and having become extinct on the death of this prince in 1660 the title was revived in the following year by Louis XIV in favour of his brother Philip. Descendants of this duke have retained the title until the present day, one of them becoming king of France as Louis Philippe in 1830. Two distinguished families are descended from the first house of Orleans: the counts of Angoulême, who were descended from John, a son of Duke Louis I, and who furnished France with a king in the person of Francis I; and the counts and dukes of Longueville, whose founder was John, count of Dunois, the bastard of Orleans, a natural son of the same duke. In addition to the dukes of Orleans the most important members of this family are: Anne Marie Louise, duchess of Montpensier; Francis, prince of Joinville; Louis Philippe Albert, count of Paris; and the traveller Prince Henry of Orleans.

PORTUGAL. The Establishment of the Monarchy.—The origin of Portugal, as a separate state, was an incident in the Christian reconquest of Spain. Towards the close of the 11th century crusading knights came from every part of Europe to aid the kings of northern and central Spain in driving out the Moors. Among these adventurers was Count Henry of Burgundy, an ambitious warrior who, in 1095, married Theresa, natural daughter of Alphonso VI, king of Leon. The county of Portugal, which had already been won back from the Moors (1055-1064), was included in Theresa's dowry. Count Henry ruled as a vassal of Alphonso VI, whose Galician marches were thus secured against any sudden Moorish raid. But in 1109 Alphonso VI died, bequeathing all his territories to his legitimate daughter Urraca, and Count Henry at once invaded Leon, hoping to add to his own dominions at the expense of his suzerain. After three years of war against Urraca and other rival claimants to the throne of Leon, Count Henry himself died in 1112. He left Theresa to govern Portugal north of the Mondego during the minority of her infant son Affonso Henriques (Alphonso I): south of the Mondego the Moors were still supreme.

Theresa renewed the struggle against her half-sister and suzerain Urraca in 1116-1117, and again in 1120; in 1121 she was besieged in Lanhoso and captured. But a peace was negotiated by the archbishops Diego Gelmires of Santiago de Compostela and Maurice Bourdin of Braga, rival churchmen whose wealth and military resources enabled them to dictate terms. Bitter jealousy existed between the two prelates, each claiming to be primate of "all the Spains," and their antagonism had some historical importance in so far as it fostered the growth of separatist tendencies among the Portuguese. But the quarrel was temporarily suspended because both Gelmires and Bourdin had reason to dread the extension of Urraca's authority. It was arranged that Theresa should be liberated and should continue to hold the county of Portugal as a fief (honor) of Leon. During the next five years she lavished wealth and titles upon her lover Fernando Peres, count of Trava, thus estranging her son, the archbishop of Braga and the nobles, most of whom were foreign crusaders. In 1128, after her power had been crushed in another unsuccessful conflict with Leon and Castile, she was deposed by her own rebellious subjects and exiled in company with Peres. She died in 1130.

Alphonso, who became count of Portugal in 1128, was one of the warrior heroes of medieval romance; his exploits were sung by troubadours throughout south-western Europe, and even in Africa "ibn Errik"—the son of Henry—was known and feared. The annals of his reign have been encumbered with a mass of legends, among which must be included the account of a cortes held at Lamego in 1143; probably also the description of the Valdevez tournament, in which the Portuguese knights are said to have vanquished the champions of Leon and Castile. Alphonso was occupied in almost incessant border fighting against his Christian or Moorish neighbours. Twelve years of campaigning on the Galician frontier were concluded in 1143 by the peace of Zamora, in which Alphonso was recognized as independent of any Spanish sovereign, although he promised to be a faithful vassal of the pope and to pay him a yearly tribute of four ounces of gold. In 1167, however, the war was renewed. Alphonso succeeded in conquering part of Galicia, but in attempting to capture the frontier fortress of Badajoz he was wounded and forced to surrender to Ferdinand II of Leon (1169). Ferdinand was his son-in-law, and was probably disposed to leniency by the imminence of a Moorish invasion in which Portugal could render useful assistance. Alphonso was therefore released under promise to abandon all his conquests in Galicia.

He had already won many victories over the Moors. At the beginning of his reign the religious fervour which had sustained the Almoravide dynasty was rapidly subsiding; in Portugal independent Moorish chiefs ruled over cities and petty states, ignoring the central government; in Africa the Almohades were destroying the remnants of the Almoravide power. Alphonso took advantage of these dissensions to invade Alemtejo, reinforced by the Templars and Hospitallers, whose respective headquarters were at Soure and Thomar. On the 25th of July 1139 he defeated the combined forces of the Moors on the plains of Ourique, in Alemtejo. Legend has magnified the victory into the rout of 200,000 Moslems under five kings; but so far was the battle from being decisive that in 1140 the Moors were able to seize the fortress of Leiria, built by Alphonso in 1135 as an outpost for the defence of Coimbra, his capital. In 1144 they defeated the Templars at Soure. But on the 15th of March 1147 Alphonso stormed the fortress of Santarem, and about the same time a band of crusaders on their way to Palestine landed at Oporto and volunteered for the impending siege of Lisbon. Among them were many Englishmen, Germans and Flemings, who were afterwards induced to settle in Portugal. Aided by these powerful allies, Alphonso captured Lisbon on the 24th of October 1147. This was the greatest military achievement of his reign. The Moorish garrisons of Palmella, Cintra and Almada soon capitulated, and in 1158 Alcacer do Sal, one of the chief centres of Moorish commerce, was taken by storm. At this time, however, the Almohades had triumphed in Africa and invaded the Peninsula, where they were able to check the Portuguese reconquest, although isolated bands of crusading adventurers succeeded in establishing themselves in various cities of Alemtejo. The most famous of these free-lances was Giraldo Sempavor ("Gerald the Fearless"), who captured Evora in 1166. In 1171 Alphonso concluded a seven years' truce with the Moors; weakened by his wound and by old age, he could no longer take the field, and when the war broke out afresh he delegated the chief command to his son Sancho. Between 1179 and 1184 the Moors retrieved many of their losses in Alemtejo, but were unable to retake Santarem and Lisbon. Alphonso died on the 6th of December 1185. He had secured for Portugal the status though not the name of an independent kingdom, and had extended its frontier southwards from the Mondego to the Tagus. He had laid the foundation of its navy and had strengthened, if he did not inaugurate, that system of co-operation between the Crown and the military orders which afterwards proved of incalculable service in the maritime and colonial development of the nation.

Sancho I continued the war against the Moors with varying fortune. In 1189 he won Silves, then the capital of Algarve; in 1192 he lost not only Algarve but the greater part of Alemtejo, including Alcacer do Sal. A peace was then arranged, and for the next eight years Sancho was engaged in hostilities against Alphonso IX of Leon. The motives and course of this indecisive struggle are equally obscure. It ended in 1201, and the last decade of Sancho's reign was a period of peaceful reform which earned for the king his popular name of o Povoador, the "maker of towns." He granted fresh charters to many cities, legalizing the system of self-government which the Romans had bequeathed to the Visigoths and the Moors had retained or improved. Lisbon had already (1179) received a charter from Alphonso I. Sancho also endeavoured to foster immigration and agriculture, by granting estates to the military orders and municipalities on condition that the occupiers should cultivate or colonize their lands. Towards the close of his reign he became embroiled in a dispute with Pope Innocent III. He had insisted that priests should accompany their flocks in battle, had made them amenable to secular jurisdiction, had withheld the tribute due to Rome and had even claimed the right of disposing of ecclesiastical domains. Finally he had quarrelled with Martinho Rodrigues, the unpopular bishop of Oporto, who was besieged for five months in his palace and then forced to seek redress in Rome (1209). As Sancho was in weak health and had no means of resisting Papal pressure, he made full submission (1210); and after bestowing large estates on his sons and daughters, he retired into the monastery of Alcobaça, where he died in 1211.

RETHEL, a town of N. France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Ardennes, on the right bank of the Aisne and the Ardennes canal, 31 m. S.W. of Mézières by rail. Pop. (1906) 5254. The church of St Nicholas was formed by the amalgamation of two churches, the oldest of which dates from the 13th century. Rethel has a subprefecture, a tribunal of first instance, a board of trade arbitration, a chamber of arts and manufactures and a school of agriculture, and carries on wool-spinning, the weaving of light woollen fabrics, and the manufacture of millboard and farm implements.

Rethel (Castrum Retectum), of Roman origin, was from the end of the 10th century the seat of a countship which passed successively to the families of Flanders, Burgundy, Cleves, Foix and Gonzaga. In 1581 it was erected into a duchy in favour of the latter. In 1663 it was sold by Charles VI de Gonzaga to Mazarin, whose family held it till the Revolution.

ROGER I (1031-1101), ruler of Sicily, was the youngest son of Tancred of Hauteville. He arrived in Southern Italy soon after 1057. Malaterra, who compares Robert Guiscard and his brother to "Joseph and Benjamin of old," says of Roger: "He was a youth of the greatest beauty, of lofty stature, of graceful shape, most eloquent in speech and cool in counsel. He was far-seeing in arranging all his actions, pleasant and merry all with men; strong and brave, and furious in battle." He shared with Robert Guiscard the conquest of Calabria, and in a treaty of 1062 the brothers in dividing the conquest apparently made a kind of "condominium" by which either was to have half of every castle and town in Calabria. Robert now resolved to employ Roger's genius in reducing Sicily, which contained, besides the Moslems, numerous Greek Christians subject to Arab princes who had become all but independent of the sultan of Tunis. In May 1061 the brothers crossed from Reggio and captured Messina. After Palermo had been taken in January 1072 Robert Guiscard, as suzerain, invested Roger as count of Sicily, but retained Palermo, half of Messina and the north-east portion (the Val Demone). Not till 1085, however, was Roger able to undertake a systematic crusade. In March 1086 Syracuse surrendered, and when in February 1091 Noto yielded the conquest was complete. Much of Robert's success had been due to Roger's support. Similarly the latter supported Duke Roger, his nephew, against Bohemund, Capua and his rebels, and the real leadership of the Hautevilles passed to the Sicilian count. In return for his aid against Bohemund and his rebels the duke surrendered to his uncle in 1085 his share in the castles of Calabria, and in 1091 the half of Palermo. Roger's rule in Sicily was more real than Robert Guiscard's in Italy. At the enfeoffments of 1072 and 1092 no great undivided fiefs were created, and the mixed Italian, Norman and other French vassals owed their benefices to the count. No feudal revolt of importance therefore troubled Roger. Politically supreme, the count became master of the insular Church. While he gave full toleration to the Greek Churches, he created new Latin bishoprics at Syracuse and Girgenti and elsewhere, nominating the bishops personally, while he turned the archbishopric of Palermo into a Catholic see. The Papacy, favouring a prince who had recovered Sicily from Greeks and Moslems, granted to him and his heirs in 1098 the Apostolic Legateship in the island. Roger practised general toleration to Arabs and Greeks, allowing to each race the expansion of its own civilization. In the cities the Moslems, who had generally secured such terms of surrender, retained their mosques, their kadis, and freedom of trade; in the country, however, they became serfs. He drew from the Moslems the mass of his infantry, and St Anselm visiting him at the siege of Capua, 1098, found "the brown tents of the Arabs innumerable." Nevertheless the Latin element began to prevail with the Lombards and other Italians who flocked into the island in the wake of the conquest, and the conquest of Sicily was decisive in the steady decline from this time of Mahommedan power in the western Mediterranean.

ROGER II (1093-1154), king of Sicily, son of the preceding, began personally to rule in 1112, and from the first aimed at uniting the whole of the Norman conquests in Italy. In June 1127, William, duke of Apulia, grandson of Robert Guiscard, died childless, having apparently made some vague promise of the succession to Roger. In any case Roger claimed at once, not only all the Hauteville possessions, but also the overlordship of Capua, for which Richard II in 1098 had sworn homage to Duke Roger. The union of Sicily and Apulia, however, was resisted by Honorius II and by the subjects of the duchy itself, averse from any strong ducal power, and the pope at Capua (Dec. 1127) preached a crusade against the claimant, setting against him Robert II of Capua and Ranulf of Alife, or Avellino, brother-in-law of Roger, who proved himself the real leader of the revolt. The coalition, however, failed, and in August 1128 Honorius invested Roger at Benevento as duke of Apulia. The baronial resistance, which was backed by Naples, Bari, Salerno and other cities, whose aim was civic freedom, also gave way, and at Melfi (Sept. 1129) Roger was generally recognized as duke by Naples, Capua and the rest. He began at once to enforce order in the Hauteville possessions, where the ducal power had long been falling to pieces. For the binding together of all his states the royal name seemed essential, and the death of Honorius in February 1130, followed by a double election, seemed the decisive moment. While Innocent II fled to France, Roger, with deep design, supported Anacletus II. The price was a crown, and on the 27th of September 1130 a bull of Anacletus made Roger king of Sicily. He was crowned in Palermo on the 25th of December 1130.

This plunged Roger into a ten years' war. Bernard of Clairvaux, Innocent's champion, built up against Anacletus and his "half heathen king" a coalition joined by Louis VI of France, Henry I of England and the emperor Lothar. Meanwhile the forces of revolt in South Italy drew to a head again. The rebels under Ranulf shamefully defeated the king at Nocera on the 24th of July 1132. Nevertheless, by July 1134 his terrific energy and the savagery of his Saracen troops forced Ranulf, Sergius, duke of Naples, and the rebels to submit, while Robert was expelled from Capua. Meanwhile Lothar's contemplated attack upon Roger had gained the backing of Pisa, Genoa and the Greek emperor, all of whom feared the growth of a powerful Norman kingdom. In February 1137 Lothar began to move south and was joined by Ranulf and the rebels; in June he besieged and took Bari. At San Severino, after a victorious campaign, he and the pope jointly invested Ranulf as duke of Apulia (Aug. 1137), and the emperor then retired to Germany. Roger, freed from the utmost danger, recovered ground, sacked Capua and forced Sergius to acknowledge him as overlord of Naples. At Rignano the indomitable Ranulf again utterly defeated the king, but in April 1139 Ranulf died, leaving none to oppose Roger, who subdued pitilessly the last of the rebels.

The death of Anacletus (25 Jan. 1138) determined Roger to seek the confirmation of his title from Innocent. The latter, invading the kingdom with a large army, was skilfully ambushed at Galuccio on the Garigliano (22 July 1139). This secured the king's object; on the 25th July the pope invested him as Rex "Siciliae ducatus Apuliae et principatus Capuae." The boundaries of the "regno" were finally fixed, by a truce with the pope in October 1144, at a line south of the Tronto and east of Terracina and Ceprano.

Roger, now become one of the greatest kings in Europe, made Sicily the leading maritime power in the Mediterranean. A powerful fleet was built up under several "admirals," or "emirs," of whom the greatest was George of Antioch, formerly in the service of the Moslem prince of El Mehdia. Mainly by him a series of conquests were made on the African coast (1135-53) which reached from Tripoli to Cape Bona. The second crusade (1147-48) gave Roger an opportunity to revive Robert Guiscard's designs on the Greek Empire. George was sent to Corinth at the end of 1147 and despatched an army inland which plundered Thebes. In June 1149 the admiral appeared before Constantinople and defied the Basileus by firing arrows against the palace windows. The attack on the empire had, however, no abiding results. The king died at Palermo on the 26th of February 1154, and was succeeded by his fourth son William.

Personally Roger was of tall and powerful body, with long fair hair and full beard. "He had," says Romnald of Salerno," a lion face, and spoke with a harsh voice." With little or none of Robert Guiscard's personal valour, and living at intervals the life of an eastern Sultan, he yet showed to the full his uncle's audacity, diplomatic skill and determination. It is Roger II's distinction to have united all the Norman conquests into one kingdom and to have subjected them to a government scientific, personal and centralized. The principles of this are found in the Assizes of the kingdom of Sicily, promulgated at Ariano in 1140, which enforced an almost absolute royal power. At Palermo Roger drew round him distinguished men of various races, such as the famous Arab geographer Idrisi and the historian Nilus Doxopatrius. The king's active and curious mind welcomed the learned; he maintained a complete toleration for the several creeds, races and languages of his realm; he was served by men of nationality so dissimilar as the Englishman Thomas Brun, a kaid of the Curia, and, in the fleet, by the renegade Moslem Christodoulos, and the Antiochene George, whom he made in 1132 "amiratus amiratorum," in effect prime vizier. The Capella Palatina, at Palermo, the most wonderful of Roger's churches, with Norman doors, Saracenic arches, Byzantine dome, and roof adorned with Arabic scripts, is perhaps the most striking product of the brilliant and mixed civilization over which the grandson of the Norman Trancred ruled.

ROHAN, the name of one of the most illustrious of the feudal families of France, derived from that of a small town in Morbihan, Brittany. The family appears to have sprung from the viscounts of Porhoët, and claims connexion with the ancient sovereigns of Brittany. Since the 12th century it held an important place in the history of Brittany, and strengthened its position by alliances with the greatest houses in France. It was divided into several branches, the eldest of which, that of the viscounts of Rohan, became extinct in 1527. Of the younger branches the most famous is that of Guéménée, from which sprang the branches of Montbazon, Soubise and Gié. The seigneurs of Frontenay, an offshoot of this last branch, inherited by marriage the property of the eldest branch of the house. Hercule de Rohan, duc de Montbazon (1568-1654) served Henry III and Henry IV against the League, and was made by Henry IV governor of Paris and the Isle of France, and master of the hounds. His grandson, Louis de Rohan-Guéménée, the chevalier de Rohan, who was notorious for his dissolute life, conspired with the Dutch against Louis XIV and was beheaded in Paris in 1674. In the 18th century the Soubise branch furnished several prelates, cardinals and bishops of Strassburg, among others the famous cardinal de Rohan, the hero of the affair of the diamond necklace. The seigneurs of Gié, a branch founded by Pierre de Rohan (1453-1513), a cadet of the branch of Guéménée and marshal of France, were conspicuous on the Protestant side during the wars of religion. René de Rohan, seigneur of Pontivy and Frontenay, commanded the Calvinist army in 1570, and defended Lusignan with great valour when it was besieged by the Catholics (1574-75). His son Henry, the first duke of Rohan, also distinguished himself in the Protestant army. His only child, Marguerite de Rohan, married in 1645 Henri Chabot, a cadet of a great family of Poitou. This marriage was opposed by her mother, Marguerite de Bethune, who put forward a rival heir called Tancred, whom she claimed to be her son by the duke of Rohan. This Tancred perished in the Fronde in 1649. The property and titles of Henry de Rohan thus passed to the Chabot family, which under the name of Rohan-Chabot produced some distinguished soldiers and a cardinal archbishop of Besançon. The male line of the Rohans is now represented by an offshoot of the Rohan-Guéménée branch.

VALOIS, COUNTS AND DUKES OF. The French countship of Valois (pagus Vadensis) takes its name from Vez (Latin Vadum), its early capital, a town in the department of the Oise. From the 10th to the 12th century it was owned by the counts of Vermandois and of Vexin; but on the death of Eleanor, sister and heiress of Count Raoul V (d. 1167), it was united to the crown by King Philip Augustus. Soon detached from the royal domain, Valois was the property of Blanche of Castile, widow of Louis VIII, from 1240 to 1252, and of Jean Tristan, a younger son of Louis IX, from 1268 to 1270. In 1285 Philip III gave the county to his son Charles (d. 1325), whose son and successor, Philip, count of Valois, became king of France as Philip VI in 1328. Sixteen years later Valois was granted to Philip's son, Philip, duke of Orleans; then passing with the duchy of Orleans in 1392 to Louis (d. 1407), a son of Charles V, it was erected into a duchy in 1406, and remained the property of the dukes of Orleans until Duke Louis became king of France as Louis XII in 1498, when it was again united with the royal domain.

After this event the duchy of Valois was granted to several ladies of the royal house. Held by Jeanne, countess of Taillebourg (d. 1520), from 1516 to 1517, and by Marie, countess of Vendôme, from 1530 until her death in 1546, it was given to Catherine de Medici, the widow of Henry II, in 1562, and in 1582 to her daughter, Margaret of Valois, the wife of Henry of Navarre. In 1630 Louis XIII granted Valois to his brother Gaston, duke of Orleans, and the duchy formed part of the lands and titles of the dukes of Orleans from this time until the Revolution.

The house of Valois, a branch of the great Capetian family, is thus descended from Charles, a son of Philip III, and has been divided into several lines, three of which have reigned in France. These are: (1) the direct line, beginning with Philip VI, which reigned from 1328 to 1498; (2) the Orleans branch, descended from Louis, duke of Orleans, a son of Charles V, from 1498 to 1515; (3) the Angoulême branch, descendants of John, another son of the same duke, from 1515 to 1589. Excluding the royal house, the most illustrious of the Valois branches are: the dukes of Alençon, descendants of Charles, a younger son of Charles I, count of Valois; the dukes of Anjou, descendants of Louis, the second son of King John II; and the dukes of Burgundy, descendants of Philip, the fourth son of the same king.