the Virtues harangued in turn, or where knights delivered maidens from
giants and "salvage men." In the south there was less misery and more
progress. Jacques Cœur's house at Bourges is still a marvel of household
architecture; and René, Duke of Anjou and Count of Provence, was an
excellent painter on glass, and also a poet.




CHAPTER III.

THE STRUGGLE WITH BURGUNDY.


1. Power of Burgundy.--All the troubles of France, for the last 80
years, had gone to increase the strength of the Dukes of Burgundy. The
county and duchy, of which Dijon was the capital, lay in the most
fertile district of France, and had, as we have seen, been conferred on
Philip the Bold. His marriage had given to him Flanders, with a gallant
nobility, and with the chief manufacturing cities of Northern Europe.
Philip's son, John the Fearless, had married a lady who ultimately
brought into the family the great imperial counties of Holland and
Zealand; and her son, Duke Philip the Good, by purchase or inheritance,
obtained possession of all the adjoining little fiefs forming the
country called the Netherlands, some belonging to the Empire, some to
France. Philip had turned the scale in the struggle between England and
France, and, as his reward, had won the cities on the Somme. He had
thus become the richest and most powerful prince in Europe, and seemed
on the point of founding a middle state lying between France and
Germany, his weak point being that the imperial fiefs in Lorraine and