- ii.] GROWING IMPORTANCE OF THE KINGS. 31
Emperors, had dropped, enabled the French gradually to claim the great German king and emperor as belonging to themselves. And a crowd of stories told of him and his twelve paladins or peers, who were supposed to have led his armies. Out of these romances King Philip at once called to life the peers of France, who tried the Duke of Normandy. Philip had found out that the only way to keep a vassal in check was to unite the rest against him, and he held regular assemblies, called coiirs pleinieres, which kept up the sense of being one body bound to keep order. 20. War of Flanders. — The great feudal princes now began to take alarm. When Innocent III. found John regardless of the interdict on England, he made Philip champion of the Church, and offered him the kingdom of England. When the French vassals were summoned to invade England, there was a flat refusal from Ferdinand of Portugal, Count of Flanders in right of his wife. Philip swore that Flanders should become France, and as John had submitted to the Pope, he turned his arms on Flanders, claiming it as the right of his son Lewis, through Isabel of Hainault. This raised a great coalition against him of all the feudal chiefs of the Low Countries, together with King John and his nephew the Emperor Otto of Bru7is'ivick, each with a different quarrel, but all really in dread of the growing power of the French crown. Philip had, besides his own direct vassals, the burghers trained to arms from the cities which had communes, and which knew that the feudal chiefs only longed to grind them down, so that they made common cause with the king. John had landed at Rochelle, and though joined by the Angevins, was defeated by Lewis ; but the tug of war was in Flanders, when, in 12 14, the two armies met on the bridge of Bom'ines, and there was a hotly-contested battle, in which the emperor and the French king took their full share of danger. Philip was once borne down, but was aided and remounted, and Otto was almost in the hands of the F"rench knights, when his horse, being wounded, grew unmanageable, and ran away with him out of the battle. The Counts of Boulogne and Flanders were taken prisoners, and their whole force broken, except 700 Brabangons, who stood like a wall and were all killed. Bouvines was the first great French victor}', a victory won by men of the Romance speech over a Teutonic alliance of English, Flemings, and Germans. It was also the first of the
