went on crusade, dying on the second expedition.
Generalized and applied to the kingdom as a whole, Louis’s discipline meant
doling out proper justice to all. As the upholder of right in his realm, Louis
pronounced judgment on some disputes himself—most famously under an oak tree in
the Vincennes forest, near his palace. This personal touch polished Louis’s image, but
his wide-ranging administrative reforms were more fundamentally important for his
rule. Most cases that came before the king were not, in fact, heard by him personally
but rather by professional judges in the Parlement, a newly specialized branch of the
royal court.^8 Louis also created a new sort of official, the enquêteurs: like the missi
dominici of Charlemagne’s day, they traveled to the provinces to hear complaints
about the abuses of royal administrators. At the same time, Louis made the
seneschals and baillis, local officials created by Philip Augustus, more accountable to
the king by choosing them directly. They called up the royal vassals for military duty,
collected the revenues from the royal estates, and acted as local judges. For the
administration of the city of Paris, which had been lax and corrupt, Louis found a
solution in the joint rule of royal officials and citizens.
There were discordant voices in France, but they were largely muted and
unrecognized. Paris may have been governed by a combination of merchants and
royalists, but at the level of the royal court no regular institution spoke for the
different orders. This began to change only under Louis’s grandson, Philip IV the
Fair (r.1285–1314). When Philip challenged the reigning pope, Boniface VIII (1294–
1303), over rights and jurisdictions (see below for the issues), he felt the need to
explain, justify, and propagandize his position. Summoning representatives of the
French estates—clergy, nobles, and townspeople—to Paris in 1302, Philip presented
his case in a successful bid for support. In 1308 he called another representative
assembly, this time at Tours, to ratify his actions against the Templars—the crusading
order that had served as de facto bankers for the Holy Land. Philip had accused the
Templars of heresy, arrested their members, and confiscated their wealth. He wanted
the estates to applaud him, and he was not disappointed. These assemblies, ancestors
of the French Estates General, were convened sporadically until the Revolution of
1789 overturned the monarchy. Yet representative institutions were never fully or
regularly integrated into the pre-revolutionary French body politic.
NEW FORMATIONS IN EAST CENTRAL EUROPE
Like a kaleidoscope—the shards shuffling before falling into place—East Central
