VIII.] POWER OF THE CROWN. 143 could give no help, as this was just the time of the great struggle with the Turks, who besieged Vienna in 1683, about this time, also, Lewis had wars with the pirates of Africa, and bombarded Algiers. In 1684 truce for twenty years was made with Spain. The same year Lewis picked a quarrel with the commonwealth of Genoa, and the city was bombarded. Peace was made the next year, the proud king having required that the Doge of Genoa should come in person and express the sorrow of the commonwealth for having displeased the King of France. This was also a time of ecclesiastical disputes. The regale or royal powers over the Church which Francis I. had obtained from Leo. X. had hitherto only concerned the churches of the older portions of the kingdom. Provence, Guienne, Languedoc, and the Dauphiny had not been included, but in 1673 Lewis put forth an edict placing them under the same rules. Pope Innocent XI. strongly resisted, but the king had so entirely mastered people's minds that Cond^ said that he believed that, if the king turned Huguenot, every one would follow him. The question was a curious complication between the rights of a national Church and the claims of Rome. The clergy strongly took the national view, and in 1682 held a synod, in which four articles drawn up by Bossuet were accepted as the charter of the Gallican Church ; these were that the ecclesiastical power has no authority in the temporal affairs of princes, that a general council is superior to the pope, that the decrees of popes must be ruled by the usages of national Churches, and that they need confirmation by the Church in general. Innocent was much offended, but he durst not entirely break with one so powerful as Lewis XIV. He did indeed refuse to confirm the king's appointments to bishoprics ; but there was no actual schism, and Bossuet at length devised a scheme by which the bishops should govern in the right of the powers conferred on them by their chapters. Lewis excluded the higher clergy from his council, and prevented them from - having any political influence. " The state is myself," was t ctit^ one of his sayings, and he carried it out towards the Church '*' just as in other matters. The nobihty had nothing to do save as officers at court or in the army ; they had hardly any territorial jurisdiction on their own estates ; the seignorial rights that were left to them meant nothing but the power of forcing dues in money, in kind, and in laboui from the poor peasants. The parliament had become
