The king's assumed right to the territories thus disposed of arose partly from the conquests of his father, and partly from Amauri, who a few days later executed a third cession of all his claims without reserve or consideration, other than what the king in his bounty might see fit to grant. The reward he obtained was the reversion of the dignity of Constable of France, which fell in the next year on the death of Matthieu de Montmorency. In 1237 he foolishly revived his claims, again styled himself Duke of Narbonne, made an unsuccessful effort to seize Dauphiné in right of his wife, and invaded the county of Melgueil, thereby incurring the wrath of Gregory IX., who ordered him as a penance to join the crusade then preparing to start for the Holy Land. In effect he did so, and Gregory generously granted him, to be paid after he was beyond seas, the large sum of three thousand marks out of the fund arising from the redemption of their vows by Crusaders staying at home--by this time a customary mode of selling indulgences, and one exceedingly lucrative, for this payment was assigned simply on the province of Sens and the lands of Amauri himself. In 1238 he sailed, and his customary ill-luck pursued him, for in 1241 we hear of him as a prisoner of the Saracens, and Gregory again came to his aid by contributing to his ransom four thousand marks from the same redemption fund. His death occurred the same year at Otranto, on his return from Palestine, thus closing a life of strange vicissitudes and almost uninterrupted misfortune.[182]
The house of Toulouse was thus reduced from the position of the most powerful feudatory, with possessions greater than those of the crown, to a condition in which it was to be no longer dreaded, though Gregory IX. and Frederic II., in 1234, at the reiterated request of Louis IX., restored to it the Marquisate of Provence, probably as a reward for increased zeal in persecution. Raymond no longer, as Duke of Narbonne, held the first rank among the six lay peers of France, but was relegated to the fourth place. The treaty resulted as its framers intended. In 1229 Jeanne of Toulouse and her destined husband Alphonse, brother of Louis, were children in their ninth year. Their marriage was deferred until 1237, and when Raymond, in 1249, closed his unquiet career, they succeeded to his territories. They both died without issue in 1271, when Philip III. took possession, not only of the county of Toulouse, as provided for in the settlement, but also of the other possessions which Jeanne had vainly attempted to dispose of by will, thus rendering the crown supreme throughout southern France, and preparing it for the rude shocks of the wars with Edward III. and Henry V. It is fairly questionable, indeed, whether, during those convulsions, the house of Toulouse might not have become independently royal, governing a well-defined territory of homogeneous population, had not the religious enthusiasm excited by heresy enabled the Capets, with the assistance of the papacy, to destroy it in the thirteenth century.