The land which had given birth to the institution cherished it long; and there its efforts were continually reawakened even in its decline. During the unhappy reign of Charles VI., France, torn by factions, each struggling for the sceptre of the insane monarch, saw Chivalry employed for the purposes of ambition alone. While all parties turned their arms against their fellow-countrymen, a stranger seized on the power for which they fought, and the English house of Lancaster seated itself on the throne of France. Charles VII. succeeded to a heritage of wars; but, apparently reckless, from the desperate state of his dominions, he yielded himself wholly to pleasure, without striking a blow for the recovery of his kingdom, till Joan of Arc recalled him to glory and himself. From that moment Chivalry again revived, and no period of French history presents knighthood under a brighter aspect than during the wars of Charles VII. At the same time, however, an institution was founded which soon changed the character of Chivalry, and in the end reduced it to a name. The inconveniences attached to the knightly mode of warfare were many and striking; order and discipline were out of the question; and though courage did much, Charles VII. saw that courage well directed would do infinitely more. To establish, therefore, a body over which he might have some control, he raised a company of _gen-d'armerie_, which soon by its courage and its success drew into its own rank all the great and noble of the kingdom. Thus came a great change over the Order; knights became mere soldiers, and Chivalry was used as a machine. Louis XI. contributed still more to do away Chivalry, by depressing the nobility and founding a standing army of mercenary troops. Charles VIII. and Louis XII., by romantic wars in Italy, renewed the fire of the waning institution; and Francis I., the most chivalrous of kings, beheld it blaze up under his reign like the last flash of an expiring flame. He, however unwittingly aided to extinguish it entirely, and by extending knighthood to civilians, deprived it of its original character. The pomps and pageants, the exercises and the games, which had accompanied the Order from its early days, were now less frequent: popes had censured them as vain and cruel, and many kings had discountenanced them as expensive and dangerous: but the death of Henry II., from a wound received at a tournament, put an end to them in France; and from that time all the external ceremonies of Chivalry were confined to the reception of a knight into any of the royal Orders.