Stoics and Saints - College of Stoic Philosophers

244 ST. LOUIS.
rulers, the power was very formidable, though crippled
much in practice by the influences just referred to.
The French kings before the thirteenth century were very
petty princes as regards the extent" of their dominions, com
pared with the head of the Empire, or even the great lords
of their own realms. Five departments, out of the eightynine
into which France is now divided, were all that the king
could call his own, and within that little circle he had to
carry on a constant struggle with the Counts of Chaumont,
Clermont, and half-a-dozen others, who were the torment
of his life.
Louis le Gros was the first
king of the Capetian house
(a house we must remember quite unconnected with the
Empire, and inheriting nothing but the vague title and
authority of king from the Carolingians), who made the name
King something of a substantial reality in France. That
is, he asserted and exercised a practical overlordship, as
the dispenser of justice and the protector of
the poor, over the
feudal nobles
;
an authority quite outside the feudal regime.
From that time in France the king begins
to act with
vigour in a very visible and practical way. But Philip
Augustus in the first years of the thirteenth century really
created the realm. His predecessor, Louis VII., had married
Eleanor of Aquitaine, who brought
the South of France as
her dower. Divorced subsequently, she married the able
and resolute man who afterwards became Henry
II. of
England, and has won a by no means enviable place in
our history. With her she took her whole domains, and
Henry
became lord of the extent of France between
the Loire and the Pyrenees, besides Normandy and Anjou
which were already in his hands. When Philip Augustus
ascended the throne in 1180, perhaps three-fourths of what
is now France obeyed a foreign lord. Poor Philip is
said to have exclaimed, when he began to feel the burden