gences, and one exceedingly lucrative, for this payment was assigned simply on the province of Sens and the lands of Amauri himself. In 1238 he sailed, and his customary ill-luck pursued him, for in 121:1 we hear of him as a prisoner of the Saracens, and Gregory again came to his aid by contributing to his ransom four thousand marks from the same redemption fund. His death occurred the same year at Otranto, on his return from Palestine, thus closing a life of strange vicissitudes and almost uninterrupted misfortune.[1]
The house of Toulouse was thus reduced from the position of the most powerful feudatory, with possessions greater than those of the crown, to a condition in which it was to be no longer dreaded, though Gregory IX. and Frederic II., in 1234, at the reiterated request of Louis IX., restored to it the Marquisate of Provence, probably as a reward for increased zeal in persecution. Raymond no longer, as Duke of Narbonne, held the first rank among the six lay peers of France, but was relegated to the fourth place. The treaty resulted as its framers intended. In 1229 Jeanne of Toulouse and her destined husband Alphonse, brother of Louis, were children in their ninth year. Their marriage was deferred until 1237, and when Raymond, in 1249, closed his unquiet career, they succeeded to his territories. They both died without issue in 1271, when Philip III. took possession, not only of the county of Toulouse, as provided for in the settlement, but also of the other possessions which Jeanne had vainly attempted to dispose of by will, thus rendering the crown supreme throughout southern France, and preparing it for the rude shocks of the wars with Edward III. and Henry V. It is fairly questionable, indeed, whether, during those convulsions, the house of Toulouse might not have become independently royal, governing a well-defined territory of homogeneous population, had not the religious enthusiasm excited by heresy enabled the Capets, with
- ↑ Martene Ampliss. Collect. 1. 1225.— Vaissette, III. 375, 412.— Teulet, Layettes, II. 155, No. 2000.— Raynald. ann. 1237, No. 31.— Rob. de Monte Chron. ann. 1238. — Potthast Regest. 10469, 10516-17,10563, 10579, 10666, 10670, 10996.— Cf. Berger, Les Registres dlnnoc. IV. No. 2763-69.
For the sums raised in England in 1234 by selling releases of Crusaders’ vows see Matt. Paris ann. 1234, p. 276.
