Louis VIII “The Lion” (1223-1226)
Sensing weakness across the Channel, Philip Augustus’s son, Louis VIII “The Lion,” launched an invasion of England beginning in Kent in 1216 and marching toward London where he was proclaimed king inside St. Paul’s Cathedral shortly thereafter. He might have gone a great deal further and fully conquered all of England had King John not died of dysentery on October 18, 1216, leaving behind his 9-year-old son Henry who was quickly crowned king in a hasty ceremony organized at Gloucester Cathedral (using his mother’s necklace since John had lost the crown jewels). Almost immediately the rebellious barons fell in line behind the young king and Louis’s fortunes fell. He was beaten back to the coast and forced to sign the Treaty of Lambeth which awarded him 10,000 marks in exchange for a pledge never to invade England again (as well as an admission that he had never truly been a legitimate King of England). Had Louis lived much longer he might have made an excellent King of France, but he also died of dysentery in November 1226.
Louis IX “The Saint” (1226-1270)
The crown of France fell to Louis’s 12-year-old son, Louis IX “The Saint,” while the widow of the elder Louis, Blanche (granddaughter of Henry II and Eleanor, and hence niece of Richard Coeur-de-Lion and John) served as regent. However, she was madly envious when young Louis wedded Margaret of Provence –their rooms were intensely surveilled, but the royal couple still managed to produce eleven children together. Nevertheless, Louis was an excessively pious king –every morning he heard Mass, and every afternoon the office of the dead. In keeping with his staunch piety, he took part in two disastrous Crusades during his tenure. The first was the Seventh Crusade which rather quickly ended with his entire 20,000-man army destroyed in Egypt and the king captured and ransomed after swearing an oath to never again return. But he stayed behind in Egypt another four years, ostensibly to help the remaining Crusaders before finally returning home defeated in 1254. And when he came back empty-handed, Louis found himself facing a hostile King of England (Henry III) alongside a cohort of dissatisfied French barons. Much to the shock of many Frenchmen, Louis dealt with the crisis and impending war by simply handing over French land to Henry III (Poitou, Guienne, and Gascony) in exchange for peace in Christendom and a promise from Henry to never lay claim to any further lands on the Continent. Louis deeply desired to see the Christian world united as one.
Domestically, he sought to end internal strife among the French barons and he instituted radical judicial reforms, like the introduction of the presumption of innocence. He was also an ardent collector of Christian relics, especially the supposed Crown of Thorns which was gifted to Louis from Baldwin II (the Latin Emperor of Constantinople since the Greek emperors had been replaced by the Franks after the Fourth Crusade before it was to be recaptured in 1261). He housed these relics in the Sainte-Chappelle, “the loveliest early Gothic building in all France.”
“But not even the Sainte-Chappelle was enough to satisfy Louis’s Christian zeal. There was more crusading to be done. The Eighth Crusade was his own idea. The catastrophic Seventh and his consequent imprisonment had continued to rankle, and twenty years later in 1267, when he was already in his fifty-fourth year, he decided to make one more attempt to restore Christian rule to the Holy Land” (52).
After consulting his brother, Charles of Anjou, Louis set forth once again on Crusade in an attack on Tunis. However, when the French fleet landed on the African coast, there was little water available and nearly all of it was filthy, and within days most of the men fell sick, followed by the death of Louis, himself. Charles of Anjou then hastily took over the ill-fated expedition, but with the death of the king, the heart had gone out of the Crusade and many soldiers simply returned home.
“Saint Louis – he was canonised in 1297, barely a quarter-century after his death – left a France very different from the one he had inherited. Henceforth the head of the Capetian line would be accepted everywhere as the legitimate sovereign chosen by God – a quite unprecedented move towards absolute monarchy – while his kingdom acquired a moral authority unlike anything it had known before. This made him, it need hardly be said, a difficulty act to follow” (53).
Philip III “The Bold” (1270-1285)
Louis’s son, Philip III (known as “The Bold” for no particular reason), had accompanied his father on the Eighth Crusade when he was still Count of Orléans, but he served with no real distinction or zeal. Upon returning to Paris, “he had proved timid, submissive, and strangely colourless –crushed, probably, by the domineering personalities of both his parents, and especially his mother” (53). After years of facing rebellions in Navarre, Aragon, and Sicily, he died of dysentery at Perpignan in 1285 and “was soon forgotten.”
Philip IV “The Fair” (1285-1314)
According to John Julius Norwich, “the third and last member of the great Capetian trinity was King Philip IV, the Fair; and King Philip was always a bit of a puzzle” (53). He was the eldest son of Philip “The Bold” and Isabella of Aragon, and he was “taciturn and surly, passionately acquisitive, and capable on occasion of appalling cruelty. And yet he was, unquestionably, a great king. A serious-minded and hard-working professional, he governed not with the barons but with lawyers and bureaucrats, his object not by any means that of his grandfather – to raise France to be a virtuous, peaceful and above all a Christian monarchy – but rather to make it strong, efficient, and influential. Thanks to his marriage (to Queen Joan I of Navarre) and to other inheritances, his dominions steadily increased, and with them his expenditure. Throughout his reign he was desperate for money, and he did not much care how he got it. This attitude was to make him many enemies, among whom none was more implacable than Pope Boniface VIII” (54).
Pope Boniface VIII was a worldly, erudite, scholarly, and political ruler –his aim was temporal power. However, he was not a diplomatic man and hardly understood the meaning of conciliation or compromise. Thus, in 1296 when King Philip imposed a tax on French churchmen, Boniface angrily responded with a papal bull informing European rulers there were to be no taxes on clerics without the explicit approval of Rome. But since the beggarly Catholic Church was entirely at the mercy of its wealthy financiers, of which France was among the largest, Philip simply blocked exports to Rome until Boniface was forced to relent and attempt to recover some of his lost prestige by formally canonizing Philip’s grandfather Louis IX. Then in 1301, the obscure Bishop of Pamiers was imprisoned in France after he insulted the king by calling him “a useless owl.” This led to a stand-off between king and pope, ultimately climaxing in Boniface’s claim to “papal absolutism.” At this, an army of 1,600 was dispatched from France under the leadership of Guillaume de Nogaret (whose Albigensian grandfather had been burnt at the stake, and thus had no love for the papacy). They found the pope at his palace in Anagni where a scuffle ensued and the pope was briefly captured before the locals spirited him away. Fearing a massacre if further conflict ensued, Nogaret wisely retired.
“His mission, however, had not been in vain. The old pope’s pride had suffered a mortal blow. After a few days’ rest he was escorted back to Rome, but he never recovered from the shock. He died less than a month later, on 12 October 1303. Dante, by anticipation – since the Pope’s death occurred just three years after the poet’s visit to hell – places him in the eighth circle, upside down in a furnace. The judgement may be thought a trifle harsh; but one sees, perhaps, what he meant” (56).
The successor pope only lived for a year after his election, but he was followed by Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux who took the name of Clement V, and being a French subject, Philip placed intense pressure on the nascent to remain essentially a French pope. Thus in 1309, Clement decided to settle in Avignon on the east bank of the Rhone (which was under the rule of Philip’s cousin and vassal Charles II of Anjou. This little town of several thousand was then to become of the seat of the papacy for six successive popes across nearly sixty-eight years. Despite being labeled as an era of “Babylonian captivity” for the papacy, it was anything but. Avignon was renowned for its stench and refuse, as well as its taverns and and brothels. And while the papacy descended into licentiousness, Clement proved himself to be a mere puppet for King Philip who pressured the pope to open an investigation into Boniface’s record, along with an annulment of all of Boniface’s anti-French interests.
“And still a greater humiliation was in store: Philip now involved him in what was to be the most shameful crime of his life: the elimination of the Knights Templar… It is difficult for us nowadays to understand – even to believe – the influence of the Templars in the later Middle Ages. Founded in the early twelfth century to protect the pilgrims flocking to the Holy Places after the First Crusade, within fifty years they were firmly established in almost every kingdom of Christendom, from Denmark to Spain, from Ireland to Armenia; within a century ‘the poor fellow-soldiers of Jesus Christ’ were – despite their Benedictine vows of poverty, chastity and obedience – financing half Europe, the most powerful international bankers of the civilized world” (57).
Having expelled the Jews from France and seized all of their assets in 1306 (much like what Edward I of England had done in 1290), Philip sought to do the same to the Templars. Thus, he spread insipid lies about Satanic practices at secret midnight meetings of the Templars, as well as sodomy and boiling children alive. Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Temple, was arrested and tortured along with sixty of his brethren in Paris. And when some of the men unsurprisingly confessed to some of the charges, a full-scale inquisition was put into effect by Pope Clement and undertaken by Edward II in England. Scores of knights were burned at the stake in Paris, including de Molay. It was later said that his prophetic last words predicted that both Pope Clement and King Philip would face judgement within the year –it was not lost on many observers that Pope Clement died within a month, and King Philip suffered a stroke while hunting at the age of forty-six which killed him.
“A great pope – Gregory VII for example, or Innocent III – could and would have saved the Templars; Clement V, alas, fell a long way short of greatness. His craven subservience to Philip in the most shameful chapter of the king’s reign constitutes an indelible stain on his memory” (60).
Meanwhile, throughout this era, Anglo-French relations continued to deteriorate. In 1293, a group of French sailors were attacked while ashore in British-held Gascony. The ensuing attempts at negotiations between Edward I of England and Philip IV of France over a potential marriage to Philip’s half-sister Blanche turned sour when Philip revealed she was actually already engaged to Rudolph III of Hapsburg. After the ensuing ire once again died down, war was avoided when Edward agreed to marry Blanche’s sister Margaret, and his son agreed to marry Philip’s daughter Isabella –however, the latter soon became a chief catalyst for the Hundred Years’ War.
The greatest political scandal to ever hit the Capetian line occurred (the “Tour de Nesle affair”) when Philip’s daughter Isabella (the infamous “She-Wolf of France” and wife of the Edward II of England) publicly accused all three of Philip’s daughters-in-law of adultery in the Tower of Nesle. It happened upon a particular visit to France wherein she noticed that two Norman knights were carrying purses she had gifted to Blanche (daughter of Otto IV, Count of Burgundy), Margaret of Burgundy (wife of Philip’s son Louis, and daughter of Robert II, Duke of Burgundy), and Joan (eldest daughter of Otto IV, Count of Burgundy) were being carried by two knights: Gautier and Philippe d’Aunay. Apparently, Margaret and Blanche were entrapped in boring marriages while Joan merely enjoyed watching the activities in the tower. And when the scandal was apparently proven true, the two unfortunate knights were interrogated under pain of torture, then castrated, drawn and quartered, and finally hanged. The three ladies, meanwhile, had their heads shaved and were imprisoned –Margaret was later quietly smothered in jail when her husband acceded the throne of France so that he might remarry, while Blanche remained in the dungeons for eight years before being sent off to a nunnery, and Joan was tried but found innocent, only condemned to serve a year in prison.
Many historians have since speculated as to whether or not this scandal was all a ploy for the “She-Wolf” to carve a path for her husband’s path to the crown of France. However, her marriage was soon to face its own cataclysmic collapse as it was widely believed she was indirectly responsible for Edward II’s hideous death thereby granting she and her lover, Roger Mortimer, the ability to seize power in England in 1326.
House of Capet (to be continued)
- Louis VIII “The Lion” (1223-1226)
- Louis IX “The Saint” (1226-1270)
- Philip III “The Bold” (1270-1285)
- Philip IV “The Fair” (1285-1314)
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.