In the interval there had
been sharp vicissitudes of failure and success: the expulsion of the English by
Philip Augustus from Normandy, Maine, Anjou, Touraine, and Poitou; the capture
of Calais and recovery of Aquitaine by Edward III and the Black Prince; the
almost complete undoing of their work by Charles V and Bertrand Duguesclin; the
union of the French and English crowns (1420), resulting from the victories of
Henry V and the murderous feud of the Burgundian and Armagnac factions; the
apparition of Jeanne d'Arc as the prophetess of French nationalism, and the
regeneration of the French monarchy by a new race of scientific statesmen. All
the West had been shaken by this secular duel. For Scotland it spelled
independence, for Navarre the loss of independence; in Castile it set on the
throne the new dynasty of Trastamare; to Aragon the result was the appearance
of a new rival in Mediterranean commerce, the frustration of hopes which had centred
round Provence and Languedoc, the imperilling of others which were fixed on
Italy.
With each successive triumph of French over English arms, the influence
of France penetrated farther to the south and east; and by the marriages or
military successes of princes of the French blood-royal, new territories were
joined to the sphere of the western nations. Under St. Louis the counties of
Toulouse and Provence became French appanages; his brother, Charles of Anjou,
added to Provence the derelict kingdom of Naples; and Sicily only escaped from
the rule of the Angevins by submission to the House of Aragon. After the
victories of Charles V the Valois dukes of Burgundy, supported by the influence
now of France and now of England, sketched the outlines of a new Middle Kingdom,
stretching from the Jura to the Zuyder Zee, and chiefly composed of lands which
had hitherto been attached to the Empire.
