For more than a century the sword of royalty, so far as it pertained to France, had been valiantly carried. But the son of Louis VIII was a child of eleven years. A coalition of the most powerful vassals was formed at once to profit by his minority. The regent, his mother, Blanche of Castile, won to her side one of the confederates, Thibaut, the powerful count of Champagne, sent the royal army to save him from the attack of his former allies and obtained from him, when he inherited the kingdom of Navarre, the important counties of Blois, Chartres, and Sancerre. A treaty, signed in 1229, assured to one of the king’s brothers the succession of the county of Toulouse and a marriage arranged between a second brother of St. Louis and the heiress of Provence prepared the way, at a future date, for the union of that country with France. Already the royal seneschals were established at Beaucaire and Carcassonne, by which the king found himself master, through himself or his brothers, of a large part of southern France. The king’s majority was proclaimed in 1236, but the wise regent still held the greatest influence over her son and the direction of affairs. The great pontificate of Innocent III had given new energy to the church and to religious sentiment. The spirit of the Crusades which had been extinguished during the rivalry of Philip Augustus with Richard Cœur de Lion and John Lackland was rekindled. In 1235 preaching the “holy war” was recommenced in France, and, as on too many other occasions, the movement was begun by the massacre of those whose ancestors had nailed the sainted victim to the cross of Golgotha. Everywhere the Jews were slaughtered, until the Council of Tours was obliged to take these unhappy people under their protection. Heretics found even less mercy. Thibaut of Champagne burned 183 of them on Mount Aimé near Vertus. This crusade, in which Thibaut himself, the dukes of Burgundy and Brittany took part, was not successful. The crusaders were beaten at Gaza in Palestine, and those who returned brought back with them nothing but the honour of having broken a few lances in the Holy Land. [Sidenote: [1236-1259 A.D.]] Up to his war with England St. Louis gave little sign of activity; but in 1241 the emperor Frederick II detained the French prelates who had gone to Rome to attend a council, and Louis demanded with great firmness that they be set at liberty.