clearly known. Many circumstances make it probable that he died by the hand of his uncle ; and the twelve peers of France convened to inquire into his fate, branded John as a murderer, and declared the fief of Normandy a forfeit to the crown. Thus was this important province re-stored to the dominion of France, after having been in the possession of the descendants of Eollo nearly three cen-turies. The only male heir now remaining to the House of Pian-tagenet, was the recreant John ; and Queen Eleanor look-ing forward with fearful foreboding to the destruction of her race, sought an asylum in the convent of Fontevraud, where she died the following year. The unhappy lover of Isabella dragged on a weary * existence in the donjon of Bristol castle, and the heart of the queen, already wounded by the cruelty of John, and touched withj»pity for the sufferings of Lusignan, began to recount in the ear of her imagination the tender devotion of her first love, and to contrast her miserable, though splendid destiny with the peace and happiness she enjoyed in the castle of Valence. The controlling spirit of the thirteenth century was In-nocent III. " Since Gregory the Seventh's time the pope had claimed the empire of the world, and taken upon him-self the responsibility of its future state. Raised to a tow-ering height, he but saw the more clearly the perils by which he was environed. He occupied the spire of the prodigious edifice of Christianity in the middle age, that cathedral of human kind, and sat soaring in the clouds on the apex of the cross, as when from the spire of Strasburg the view takes in forty towns and villages on the banks of the Rhine." From this eminence Pope Innocent surveyed the politics of Europe, and put forth his mandates to bring the power and wealth of the nations into the treasury of the church. No measures had ever been adopted which combined so effectually to move the passions of an ardent age, in a direction indicated by papal authority, as the ex- 280 HEROINES OF THE CRUSADES.