Philip II “Augustus” succeeded his father Louis VII –the imperial title “Augustus” was bestowed upon him by the chronicler Rigord— and he proved to be one of the greatest kings of France, at least according to John Julius Norwich. When he was crowned, France was in a perilous state. To the west, Henry II of England was ruling over a vast territory in France, nearly half of which was Philip’s; and to the east, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa was at the height of his power which extended across Germany and Austria as well as over the Alps and into Italy. However, over the next forty years, Philip conquered them both –but the greater of the two was Henry whom Philip despised in much the same way the French were to hate the Nazis some eight centuries later in World War II. In this case, Philip had the Church on his side, a clergy which had never forgotten Thomas Becket’s murder. Philip was also helped by the constant quarrels between Henry and his four sons –if the Plantagenets had ever managed to unite, they might have actually conquered France.
The first signs of trouble with England began in 1183 with the death of Henry’s second son, also named Henry (the first to survive infancy, known as “The Young King”” since he had been crowned in 1170). In a desperate attempt to heal the breach with France, the young Henry had been betrothed as a child and later married to Philip’s sister Margaret which came with the small but important county of Vexin northwest of Paris. Philip demanded the territory be returned, but Henry refused. Several meetings were held beneath an elm tree near Gisors to solve the dispute, but Henry only relented when King Bela III of Hungary demanded the widow’s hand in marriage (Philip’s sister), however then in 1186 came the death of Henry’s fourth son Geoffrey Duke of Brittany, leaving a pregnant wife behind him. In this wake of this tragedy, Henry argued he should retain guardianship of the region on behalf of the unborn child, but Philip objected. And what followed was two years of inconclusive fighting during which Henry’s two surviving sons, Richard and John, rebelled against their father. When Philip joined them, Henry finally relented and renounced his claim to Auvergne on July 4, 1189. It was his last political action; Henry II died within two days.
“But, suddenly, the temper of the world had changed. Exactly two years before, on 4 July 1187, the entire army of the Christian East had been destroyed by the forces of Islam. As usual, the West ha had plenty of warning, but had reacted far too late. To most Europeans, the Crusader states were remote to the point of unreality –exotic, egregious outposts of Christendom in which austerity alternated with sybaritic luxury, where douceur and danger walked hand in hand; magnificent in their way, but somehow more suited to the lays of troubadour romance than to the damp and unheroic struggle that was the common lot at home. Even to the well-informed, Levantine politics were hard to follow, the names largely unpronounceable, the news when it did arrive hopelessly distorted and out of date. Only when disaster had actually struck did the knights of western Christendom spring, with exclamations of mingled rage and horror, to their swords” (35).
It had been forty years since St. Bernard whipped up the pious into a frenzied mob that eventually coalesced into the ridiculous disaster known as the Second Crusade. By now, a rising Muslim military leader, Saladin, had set his sights on Jerusalem; while only three states remained under Frankish control in the region (Jerusalem, Tripoli, and Antioch) all of which were facing internal strife. Saladin and the Saracens easily conquered Jerusalem in 1187, but he was neither bloodthirsty nor vindictive, and thus allowed many thousands of captors to go free with the payment of a ransom –a considerably more forgiving price to be paid than was offered by the Christians in the First Crusade a century earlier. In this case, Saladin showed considerable magnanimity. “Everywhere, order was preserved. In contrast to the events following the Crusaders’ capture of the city, there was no murder, no bloodshed, no looting” (37).
In response, the recently elected Pope Gregory VIII wasted no time in calling upon Christendom to take up the Cross, and thus the twenty-five-year-old widower, Philip Augustus, and Henry II’s son Richard “Coeur de Lion” –a slightly sickly but courageous figure who resembled all the stereotypes of troubadour poetry, despite lacking in love and busily in pursuit of self-destructive ambition– joined forces and headed toward Messina. But upon arrival, Richard immediately began attempting to wiggle his way into claiming Sicily for himself, especially since his sister, Joanna (or Joan of England), was the widow William II of Sicily. Richard broke with decorum and placed his sister in the Abbey of Bagnara on the Calabrian coast before he fell upon the monks at the Basilian monastery and evicted them. It didn’t help that the Greek population was scandalized by the barbarous acts of the Englishmen and their loose ways with the local women. Shortly thereafter, Richard then haphazardly pillaged the city as his soldiers carried away the women.
Then Philip angrily departed Messina and joined in the siege of Palestine while Richard married Berengaria (Princess of Navarre), but after Philip suffered a bout of dysentery, he departed and returned home for France, leaving his army in the “holy land” under the command of the Duke of Burgundy. However, Richard remained for the fight (he and Philip were barely on speaking terms by this point) and on August 20, 1191 Richard “destroyed his chivalric reputation for ever by ordering the massacre of all his Muslim prisoners of war, some three thousand of them, together with a number of women and children; but he failed altogether to destroy Saladin” (45). But after negotiating a three-year truce with Saladin, Richard was famously shipwrecked and imprisoned by Duke Leopold of Austria before Queen Eleanor raised the 100,000 pounds of silver ransom (two or three times the annual income of the English crown). Philip’s efforts to collude with John and Emperor Henry VI to keep Richard in prison had failed. Upon Richard’s release, he sent a letter to John “Look to yourself – the devil is loose!”
While Philip Augustus was back in France, he had begun subtly violating his oath to Richard not to attack his lands by pushing poisonous rumors about Richard being in treacherous communication with Saladin, and for conspiring to cause the downfall of several Christian cities, as well as assisting in the assassination of Conrad, Marquis of Montferrat, husband of Queen Isabella of Jerusalem. When Richard returned, the kings were immediately embroiled in proxy conflicts (including one moment in which Philip nearly drowned after a bridge collapsed just as his army was crossing). But on April 6, 1199 Richard succumbed to a wound sustained from a mutinous vassal while on a minor campaign in Limousin. His wound became gangrenous and the great lion heart died shortly thereafter at the age of forty-one.
Now, Philip’s chief enemy shifted to John –a king whose reputation has recently attempted to be salvaged by a few modern historians who blame his deplorable memory on two chroniclers (Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris, both whom wrote their chronicles after his death). But according to John Julius Norwich, John was indeed “lecherous, duplicitous, faithless, and cruel – worse than his brother, the worst king England ever had” (47). John managed to alienate most of his allies and, sensing weakness, Philip easily reclaimed Normandy, Anjou, Poitou from England. Two years after John’s mother Eleanor died, Philip also recovered Aquitaine. In July 1214, Philip managed to defeat the combined armies of John, Emperor Otto IV (John’s nephew), and Count Ferdinand of Flanders. Their army numbered 25,000 while Philip had 15,000. But during the battle, both Otto and Count Ferdinand were seriously injured, and Philip was unhorsed by a Flemish pikeman. Once the men saw Otto and Count Ferdinand’s bodies carried away for medical treatment, the soldiers turned tail and fled, leaving the French to chase them down. Philip then returned to Paris a victor, with a gigantic line of prisoners. Meanwhile, Otto returned to Germany where he was compelled to abdicate; Joh returned a disgrace to England where he soon faced an uprising of barons which forced him to sign Magna Carta before he died in 1215; and Ferdinand remained a prisoner for the next twelve years.
“The reign of Philip Augustus also witnessed one of the blackest episodes in French history: what is ridiculously known as the Albigensian Crusade. It was launched in 1209, and was directed against as pure and harmless a group of innocents as ever existed. The Cathars –who became known as the Albigensian simply because they were vaguely centered on the city of Albi—had first appeared in the Languedoc around the beginning of the eleventh century. Essentially, they maintained the Manichaean doctrine that good and evil constituted two distinct spheres –that of the good, spiritual God and that of the Devil, creator of the material world—and that the Earth was a constant battleground between them. The leaders, known as the perfecti, abstained from meat and from sex; they also rejected saints, holy images and relics, together with all the sacraments of the Church, particularly baptism and marriage. To Pope Innocent III, such departures from orthodoxy could not be tolerated. At first he hoped for peaceable conversion, sending a Cistercian mission lead by a legate, Peter of Castelnau, and subsequently joined by the Spaniard Domingo de Guzman, better known as St. Dominic; but in 1208 Peter was murdered by a henchman of Count Raymond of Toulouse, and Innocent proclaimed a Crusade… That Crusade was to continue for the next twenty years, pitting the northern barons, led by Simon de Montfort, against those of the south. It led to several hideous massacres –the worst of them in the town of Monsegur—and it utterly destroyed the dazzling Provencal civilization of the early Middle Ages. Even when the war ended in 1229 with the Treaty of Paris, the heresy refused to die. It was another hundred years before the Inquisition, unleashed on the region with all its terrifying efficiance, succeeded in crushing it” (48-49).
Philip sought to pave the streets of Paris, construct the Les Halles marketplace, a great fortress on the Seine later to be called The Louvre, and continuing the reconstruction on Notre-Dame Cathedral. He died at age fifty-four in 1223. “The one stain on his record was his periodic persecution of the Jews, whom he bled white; but he left France no longer threatened by the Germans, and no longer half-occupied by the English: a France happier, almost certainly, than it had ever been” (49).
House of Capet
- Philip II “Augustus” (1180-1223)
For this reading I used John Julius Norwich’s A History of France (2018), one of his final books before his death. For further reading, see Geoffrey de Vinsauf’s Itinerary of Richard I and Others to the Holy Land.