IV.] EXTENSION TO THE SOUTH. 37 against him, they only chose to obey hterally, coming indeed, but with two men apiece. However Blanche made a great conquest by her stately beauty and high spirit ; for Theobald of Champagne, a poet full of romance, was touched by the grandeur of the brave widow guard- ing her children, called her the lady of his thoughts, became her true knight in a distant and respectful way, and saved her from the Breton army. After three years petty warfare, a treaty was signed at St. Aubin-sur- Caniicr in 1 231, by which the barons engaged to keep the peace for three years. 8. End of the War with the Albigenses, 1229. — During the queen's distress, Raymond of Toulouse the younger, after the elder was dead, gained some successes, but in 1228 the cardinal legate, Romano di St. Angela, devised the cruel expedient of devastating the country, not by mere random plunder, but rooting up vineyards, cutting down olive-trees, and making the land a desert. The unhappy people of Toulouse lost courage, and the Count came to Meaux ready to submit to any terms. Very hard they were. He kept Toulouse, which was to pass on his death to the king's brother Alfonso, who was to marry the count's daughter Joan. His other lands held of the French crown were at once surrendered, and France now reached to the Mediterranean. Instead of being shut up in the lands just round Paris, the kingdom now had an opening on three seas. Count Raymond was also to level all his castles, support doctors of theology in all his cities, and assist them in destroying heresy, and to pay 2,000 silver marks for the cost of the war. A remnant of the Albigenses still maintained a guer-rilla warfare in the Pyrenees for some years ; till they were altogether exterminated in 1244. 9. Disputes of Town and Gown at Paris, 1229. — Blanche of Castile was the ablest and best of the many queen-mothers of France. She had as firm a hand as her father-in-law, and kept down lawlessness by having a baud of hired men-at-arms in her pay. In 1229 she had to interfere in one of the disputes between burghers and scholars that take place in all university towns, and were the more furious in the early middle ages because the scholars came from all parts, and lived and lodged as best they might, without college discipline, but often starving and begging, robbing or fighting for a meal. So out- rageous had they become at Paris that Blanche sent her
