26 HISTORY OF FRANCE. [chap. religious, upright, and honourable, except when he was led astray by unscrupulous men of greater force of character. 14. Philip II., 1 1 80. — Philip II. had been crowned during his father's illness, and, though only fourteen years of age, he was already married to Isabel of Hainault, whose mother was heiress of Vermandois. He had watched enough of the dealings between his father and the Ange- vins to learn of his enemies, and when his mother and her uncles tried by force of arms to keep him in wardship, he gained the mastery by the help of the younger King Henry and an army of Brabanqotis. These Braban^ons, or free lances, from Brabant, were the first hired soldiers. Younger sons, men-at-arms, and all who were landless and not in the train of some noble, had come to make warfare a trade, and hire themselves out to any prince in need of them. The old king Henry made much use of them as a means of curbing the feudal barons. Philip was not slow to learn the lesson, but the difficulty lay in paying them while the king depended on aids from his vassals, tolls from the citizens, and grants from the clergy, with no other resource save the Jews, who lent at heavy usury to all who came to them, but whom the king could plunder whenever he pleased, so that they served him as a sponge which could always be squeezed. The power of Philip was as much narrowed by his vassals as that of his father had been; "But," said he, "please God, I shall grow older and stronger, and they will grow older and weaker." And what his father had done from feeling he did from policy, keeping up the struggle between Heniy II. and his sons out of seenving friendship for the youths. Your.g Henry died in the midst of a rebellion in 1183, and in 1 186 Geoffrey perished before Philip's eyes at Paris in a tournament. These shan^-fights had become common in the course of the century. The wife of Geof- frey, Constance, the heiress of Britanny, gave birth a few months later to a son, named Att/iiir, after the great hero of the British race, no doubt in hopes that he would bring back the Celtic line to England, and renew the glories of the Round Table. 15. The Third Crusade, 1 190. — Meantime the crusad- ing force in the East had decayed more and more, while the wh.)le Mahometan strength was joined together under the noble Suhi/i-tui-ilti-ii, or -Saladin, as the crusaders called him, who defeated Guy di Lusii^nan, who was king
