In 1306, fresh differences arose between the two kings; but before they had rekindled the torch of war, Edward I.died at the opening of a new campaign in Scotland, and his successor, Edward II., repaired to Boulogne, where he, in his turn, did homage to Philip the Handsome for the duchy of Aquitaine, and espoused Philip's daughter Isabel, reputed to be the most beautiful woman in Europe.

In spite, then, of frequent interruptions, the reign of Edward I.was on the whole a period of peace between England and France, being exempt, at any rate, from premeditated and obstinate hostilities.
In Southern France, at the foot of the Pyrenees, Philip the Handsome, just as his father, Philip the Bold, was, during the first years of his reign, at war with the Kings of Aragon, Alphonso III.

and Jayme II.; but these campaigns, originating in purely local quarrels, or in the ties between the descendants of St.Louis and of his brother, Charles of Anjou, King of the Two Sicilies, rather than in furtherance of the general interests of France, were terminated in 1291 by a treaty concluded at Tarascon between the belligerents, and have remained without historical importance.
The Flemish were the people with whom Philip the Handsome engaged in and kept up, during the whole of his reign, with frequent alternations of defeat and success, a really serious war.

In the thirteenth century, Flanders was the most populous and the richest country in Europe.

She owed the fact to the briskness of her manufacturing and commercial undertakings, not only amongst her neighbors, but throughout Southern and Eastern Europe, in Italy, in Spain, in Sweden, in Norway, in Hungary, in Russia, and even as far as Constantinople, where, as we have seen, Baldwin I., Count of Flanders, became, in 1204, Latin Emperor of the East.