Shortly after the dawn of the 10th century, a fair-haired young Viking named Rollo led his longboats up the Seine. He was not the first of the Norman invaders (the earliest Scandinavian invasion occurred over a half century before Rollo around 885 in a siege of Paris), but it was Rollo who first set his focus on learning to blend in with the new homeland of his countrymen. And within a generation or two, the Normans would all become Frenchmen. Rollo, himself, became Count of Rouen and served as the first ruler of Normandy (northern France).
“Rollo and his friends were just the men to shake France out of her lethargy and end the chaos into which she had sunk. The later Carolingian kings had been no better than their Merovingian predecessors, and were further weakened by formidable rivals, members of the house of Robert the Strong, Count of Anjou and Blois and one of the greatest magnates in the country. This ‘Robertian’ house –later to be known as Capetian—had produced elected kings who had often alternated with Carolingians. But with the country still so unclearly defined and communications still rudimentary –far worse than they had been in Roman days—government, such as it was, was largely local and lay principally in hands of the stronger, richer landowners, those who were later to crystallise into the aristocracy, who gathered their followers around them and slowly evolved what we know as the feudal system. The local lord would build himself a castle, the village would cluster round it, the villagers taking refuge inside it when necessary. Each would swear an oath of fealty to the lord, to fight for him when summoned to do so. As a system it may have been far from perfect, but it was a lot better than anarchy” (16).
House of Capet (987-1328)
The Carolingian kings “limped on” until their final demise when Louis V “The Lazy” (also known as “le Faineant” or “the do nothing”) died in a hunting accident in the forest of Senlis. Without any children, it fell to the lords of France to elect their next king: either the Carolingian Duke Charles of Lower Lorraine or Hugh Capet, great-grandson of Robert the Strong. The Archbishop of Rouen preferred Hugh Capet rather than Charles’s more legitimate claim to the throne by the principle of hereditary rule, and so with the blessing of the church, Hugh Capet came to power over a land riddled with various disparate feudal lords (such as the Dukes of Anjou, Aquitaine, Normandy, and the Counts of Flanders and Blois). However, France was hardly ready to be governed by a single king. In the south, for example, the King of the Franks was hardly even recognized at all by the far more respected Count of Toulouse. And at the time, France didn’t even share a common tongue –Celtic was spoken in Brittany, German along the eastern borders, Flemish in the north, and a dozen other dialects across the country.
But Hugh did have the church on his side, and this alliance gave him the most ornate coronation ceremony known to man by that point (he was said to be anointed all over his body with the same oil used by St. Remigius to anoint Clovis some five centuries earlier, when the ointment was allegedly brought down from heaven). Hugh was almost certainly the first of the French kings to be credited with the power of curing scrofula (“the king’s evil”) and other medieval superstitions.
However, throughout his tenure, Hugh was mostly relegated to exile at his castle. Had he departed, he risked capture or ransom by the powerful feudal lords scattered throughout the land. It wasn’t until the 12th century that a king (Philip Augustus) would be comfortable publicly identifying himself as the King of France. But for now, Hugh was merely crowned “King of the Franks” (Roi de Francs), despite hardly having the support of his people. He died on October 24, 996 in his capital city, Paris. The task was then left to his son Robert (Robert II “The Pious”) to officially found the Capetian dynasty which ruled France until the death of Charles the Fair in 1328. In fact, the succeeding houses of Valois and Bourbon were both cadet branches of the Capetian line. In this way, it might be said that the line lasted for another eight and a half centuries until 1848 with the abdication of France’s last king.
The eleventh century saw the rule of Robert II “The Pious” (996-1031), his grandson Henri I (1031-1060), and his great-grandson Philip I (1060-1108), known to his subjects as L’Amoureux (or “The Amorous”), an adulterous man whose reputation excommunicated by Pope Urban II. And the eleventh century was marked chiefly by two other major events: the Norman Conquest of Britain (which brought a new rival to France) and the First Crusade (in which many Frenchmen participated in Urban II’s brutal massacre of Muslims in Jerusalem along with the hideous public immolation of all Jews found within the city). The latter foreign occupation brought new pilgrims and wealth to France, securing the French crown for the foreseeable future –additionally, many of the French feudal lords answered the call and departed for the holy land, never again to return.
Philip the Amorous died on July 29, 1108. He was then succeeded by his son Lous VI “The Fat,” a warrior king and devotee of the Capetian supremacy who grew morbidly obese in later life. Only a few weeks before his death, he wedded his son and heir, Louis VII, to the greatest heiress in France, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Unfortunately, they were an ill-matched couple from the start. Young Louis was apparently, a morose, lugubrious, and pious king; so naturally his wife was forced to look elsewhere for love, complaining that she had unfortunately married a “monk” and “not a king.”
However, Christendom’s hold on the “holy land” was soon to fall from the Cross to the Crescent as in 1144 Edessa was lost to an Arab Army under Imad-ed-Din Zengi, a loss which horrified the denizens of Europe. They wondered: was this a manifestation of the wrath of God? Does this mean the decline of Christendom? A new crusade seemed all but inevitable, especially for the “gentle, kind-hearted” Pope Eugenius III (or “Pope Eugene”) who fled Rome and was exiled in France at the time. However, who should lead the army? Holy Roman Emperor Conrad of Hohenstaufen was saddled with internal issues in Germany, King Stephen of England was in the midst of a civil war, and of course, King Roger of Sicily was out of the question, thus the burden of a new crusade fell to King Louis VII “The Young” of France. To rouse the spiritual fervor of his people, the king turned to St. Bernard of Clairvaux, a tall, haggard, zealot whose body was in constant pain resulting from years of fasting. Despite being enfeebled, he still had a reputation for being a tireless defender of Christianity unshackled from either tolerance or moderation. He was a true fanatic. And, as promised, when St. Bernard delivered the call, the soldiers of God rose up all over Europe, particularly from France and Germany. Thus, with a customary promise of plenary absolution, a disreputable mob, commonly referred to as the “Second Crusade,” bandied together and descended upon Byzantium, and at least from the German side, it “seems to have contained more than the usual quota of undesirables, ranging from the occasional religious maniac to the usual collection of footloose ne’er-do-wells and fugitives from justice. Hardly had they entered Byzantine territory than they began pillaging the countryside, raping, ravaging and even murdering as the mood took them” (26). What met the army on the other side of the trip in Dorylaeum was a surprise-attack by a far more disciplined Turkish army that utterly decimated around nine-tenths of the German army, leading Conrad to flee back for refuge among the French forces at Nicaea. But the French also suffered terribly at the hands of the Turks in Anatolia, driven by King Louis’s paranoid delusions that every setback was just another treachery by the Byzantine Greeks. Meanwhile, the death of Zengi led to the rise of his son, Nur-ed-Din. As the French pressed on toward Antioch (at the behest of Prince Raymond, or Raymond of Poitiers) and then onto to Nur-ed-Din’s Muslim stronghold at Aleppo, along the way Queen Eleanor was eager to sue for divorce from her stoic, unloving husband, King Louis, but she kept her lips tight to protect King Louis’s reputation (which continued to suffer anyway), and upon arrival in Jerusalem, the Crusading forces decided to strike Damascus first. Why they did so continues to elude historians today because after four days of siege, this mighty Christian army was quickly demolished and forced to retreat in complete shame and embarrassment.
“Having travelled for the best part of a year, often in conditions of mortal danger, having suffered agonies of thirst, hunger and sickness and the bitterest extremes of heat and cold, this once-glorious army that had purported to enshrine all the ideals of the Christian West had given up the whole thing after just four days’ fighting, having regained not one inch of Muslim territory. It was the ultimate of humiliations –one that neither they nor their enemies would forget” (30).
The French retreat brought a heavy-hearted people back home. And after the embarrassing failure of conquest coupled with an excessively pious and seemingly joyless husband, two years passed before Queen Eleanor managed to secure her long-desired divorce on the grounds of consanguinity. But the course of history would lead this remarkable queen to marry one of England’s greatest kings, Henry II, before giving birth to two foundational kings in the Plantagenet dynasty.
King Louis VII later remarried twice, and his son, Philip, at the age of thirteen got lost on a hunt in the forest of Compiegne. Cold and hungry, a severe fever nearly killed the poor boy. In despair, King Louis traveled to Canterbury to pray (successfully) for his son’s recovery. But while en route back to Paris, the king suffered a paralytics stroke. His son was quickly crowned in Reims Cathedral by its cardinal archbishop, Guillaume aux Blanches Mains. However, Louis was too ill to attend the ceremony; and he died a year later.
“He had been a good king on the whole, although never a happy one. The Second Crusade had been a humiliation from which he never fully recovered; but it was not the last. On 18 May 1152, barely eight weeks after her divorce, Eleanor married –this time for love– the future King Henry II of England. For poor Louis, here was yet another blow. Henry was technically his vassal and should have asked his permission before marrying –even though in the circumstances such a formality would have been embarrassing for all concerned. Worse still was the fact that the bride delivered all Aquitaine to her new husband. Henry had already inherited the Duchy of Normandy from his mother, Matilda, and Maine and Anjou from his father Count Geoffrey; with the addition of Aquitaine, he now ruled from Scotland to the Pyrenees and was far more powerful in France than Louis himself. But Louis was young –he was still only thirty-two– and there was plenty of spirit left in him. He was deeply conscious, too, that he still lacked an heir. Eleanor had borne him two daughters; his second wife, Constance of Castile, was to provide him with two more before dying in childbirth; only his third, Adela of Champagne, finally produced a boy, who was baptize Philip” (33).
King Louis VII left behind two significant monuments: the Cathedral of Notre-Dame which was begun in 1163, the foundation stone is said to have been laid by Pope Alexander III (a man whom Louis protected during the pope’s long struggle with Emperor Frederick Barbarossa). The other chief architectural wonder was the University of Paris, which originated as the cathedral school and has a perfectly legitimate claim for being the oldest university in the world (after Bologna).
“For the rest, his reign was principally marked by recurrent but ultimately profitless warfare with Henry, and his consequent support of Archbishop Thomas Becket –whom, like almost everyone else who knew the man, he found insufferable. He reigned for forty-three years, on the whole wisely and well, concentrating –as his father had before him– on consolidating the royal authority across that part of the country where his writ still ran. He died on 18 September 1180 and was buried in the Cistercian Abbey of Barbeau; only in 1817 were his remains taken to Saint-Denis” (33).
House of Capet (to be continued)
- Hugh “Capet” (987-996), Duke of the Franks since 956.
- Robert II “The Pious” (996-1031), married thrice, excommunicated by the Church. Son “Hughes” the “Junior King” technically ruled from 1017-1025.
- Henry I (1031-1060), reign marked by internal struggle with the feudal lords.
- Philip I “The Amorous” (1060-1108), ruled under the regency of Anne of Kiev and Count Baldwin V until 1066.
- Louis VI “The Fat” (1108-1137), his reign contributed to the centralization of royal power. He was the first king to wage war against the English. Son Philippe technically also ruled (1129-1131).
- Louis VII “The Young” (1137-1180), known for his rivalry with Henry II of England and his military campaigns during the Second Crusade.
For this reading I used John Julius Norwich’s A History of France (2018), one of his final books before his death.