The House of Capet

THE HOUSE OF CAPET The same difficulties that confronted the last Carolingians con fronted the first Capetians. They inherited all the strength and weakness of the feudal system. Their strength was their central situation in the kingdom—the Ile de France. Their weakness was the possession of a very small domain surrounded on all sides : on the west by the county of Blois and the powerful duchy of Nor mandy ; on the north and east by the counties of Flanders and Champagne and by the duchy of Burgundy. Behind this little belt stretched provinces almost impenetrable to the royal authority— Brittany, Gascony, Toulouse, Aquitaine and the Spanish March. Thus the kings lay stifling in the midst of a feudal jungle which thrust itself up on their horizon and forced them to establish their power in the only two towns of any importance in their kingdom— Paris, the capital of the future, and Orleans, the city of learning. Their first responsibility was, therefore, to gain breathing-space, to give their energies to practical politics and, above all, to avert their eyes from that chimera of a restored empire which had ruined their predecessors. From 987 to 1o6o they carefully avoided unequal combats in which they might have weakened their claim to those titles greater than any due to feudal rights, which they held in reserve for the future. Thus the beginnings of the Capetians gave less an impression of regeneration than of a pro longation of the decadence of the Carolingians.

Hugh Capet (987-996), thanks to his diplomacy rather than to his military strength, contrived to maintain his independence despite the opposition of Charles of Lorraine (the last descendant of the Carolingians), the insubordination of the great lords and the hostility of a pope who favoured the empire. Above all, by associating his son, Robert the Pious (996-1031), with him in the royal power while he himself still lived, Hugh Capet secured the future of his dynasty by suspending the feudal right of election, an act of political sagacity that his grandson, Henry I. (1031-60) copied in 1059 in favour of his son, Philip I. But their system was still too like that of the Carolingians, and it became necessary to change it. Apart from their prudent opportunism, the greatest merit of the early Capetians was that they had sons, so that their dynasty endured without disastrous minorities and quarrels over partitions of territory.

Philip I. (1060-1108) accomplished nothing during his long reign of 48 years beyond the essential son and heir, Louis the Fat. Absorbed entirely in material pleasures and in love of money, he remained a total stranger to the great events of the second half of the 11th century. The conquest of England in 1066 by William of Normandy was begun while he was a minor and could do nothing to prevent it, but for the moment it diminished the pres sure of Normandy upon his kingdom. The first crusade was preached in 1096 by a French pope, Urban II. Philip played no part in it ; but indirectly the monarchy benefited, for while it in creased the prestige of France in the East, it also weakened the power of the feudal lords who either perished in or were ruined by it.

Louis VI., the Fat (1108-37) .

Af ter a century of lethargy, the Capetian power awoke again under Louis the Fat, who concen trated his energy on extending his territory and rendering it obedient. The summit of his ambition was effectively to establish the king's highway from Paris to Orleans, and during 34 years of war he purged his domain of feudal brigandage. To become master in his own house he allied himself to a communal move ment in Amiens against his rival Enguerrand de Coucy, but— sublimely an opportunist—he suppressed a similar movement in Laon because of the connection with it of his enemy Thomas de Marle. If he refused to admit feudal principles in his own affairs, or to his own disadvantage, he invoked them quickly enough against the great feudal lords, who were more powerful than he. Little more than a mere police officer, he had the Church on his side, but he did not allow it to dominate his actions. His principal minister, Suger, began as a simple monk; he became abbot of St. Denis. His other officials were all unimportant people, trust worthy and dependent on him. Thus, when the emperor of Ger many, Henry V., sought to invade the kingdom in 1125, he soon fell back before the united strength of the vassals and townsfolk rallied under the oriflamme of St. Denis. The moral unity of the land had become a political factor.

Louis VII. (1137-80) .

His successor, Louis VII., almost de stroyed his work at the very moment when circumstances were conspiring in his favour. The two powers of greatest danger to his kingdom—England and Germany—were rent by civil distrac tions and disputed successions. His marriage, on the other hand, with Eleanor, heiress of the duchy of Aquitaine, had increased the area of his kingdom fivefold. Suger, his father's minister, con tinued to give him the support of his wise and moderate counsel, but unhappily, the second crusade, undertaken despite his warn ings and the doubts of the pope, inaugurated a series of magnifi cent but fruitless exploits. Quarrels with his wife were even more disastrous, and the death of Suger in 1151 deprived Louis VII. of his wisest counsellor at the moment when his divorce was seriously compromising the fortunes of the Capetians. Two months after their separation Eleanor found a youthful candidate for her rich dowry in Henry of Anjou who thus added to his county of Anjou and his duchy of Normandy, the whole south-west of France. Two years later he obtained the crown of England (1154). Henry and Louis at once began the struggle between England and France which lasted till the middle ages were almost ended. Wedged in between the Angevin power and the German emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, it was little less than a miracle that the French dy nasty escaped extinction. Twice the Church saved her devoted son by the moral prestige given him by the presence in France of a refugee pope, and by the interdict which was placed on Henry II. after the assassination of Becket. Happily, after 27 years of child less wedlock, the birth in '165 of Philip Augustus saved the king dom from a war of succession.

Philip Augustus (1180-1223).--The new king had already given proofs of his cool energy and calculating ambition before his loth birthday. Having vanquished the smaller principalities, he turned to overthrow or assimilate the greater ones. In five years (118o-86) he freed himself from the Flemish tutelage of Philip of Alsace and from that of the counts of Champagne. But the essential thing was the destruction of the Angevin empire. The battle was a long one. Abandoned by his sons Henry II. in the moment of death was brought to submission, but Philip Augustus found himself confronted by a new English king, his former ally, Richard Coeur de Lion. If he accompanied him to the crusade, he did so less from a desire to go than from a wish to return. His one interest was Richard's kingdom, and the absence of his rival seemed to him to afford an opportunity to despoil it. It was a foretaste of the duel between Louis XI. and Charles the Bold, and it took the same course. When Richard was captured in Germany on returning from his crusade Philip allied himself with Richard's brother, John, and they tried to bribe the emperor, Henry VI., to keep Richard a captive; but Richard bought his liberty, and the "devil at large" cost Philip all the fruits of his intrigues and shut him off from Normandy by the strong fortress of Château Gaillard. Happily the arrow that carried off Richard at the siege of Chalus, and the misfortunes of his brother and suc cessor, John, restored success to the Capetians. Philip seized Nor mandy; then Anjou, Touraine, Maine and Poitou fell into his hands, but he failed to conquer the south-west. Fortunately for the future of his dynasty, Philip, instead of seeking to conquer England, adopted the true Capetian policy and marched against the allies of John in the north-east, the counts of Boulogne and of Flanders. The power of the Capetians had very definitely become dangerous, and a European coalition was formed to combat it. The king of England, the emperor Otto, and all the great lords of Flanders, Belgium and Lorraine allied themselves together. But the whole country responded to the call of Philip Augustus to re pulse a feudal reaction allied with foreign intervention. The na tional victory at Bouvines (1214) placed the Capetians in an un rivalled position. The sole remaining task was to destroy the feudalism existing in Languedoc. Anxious not to risk his gains, but desirous rather of consolidating them by organization, Philip left to others the toil and trouble of conquests, the advantages of which were not for them. When his son Louis wished to wrest the crown of England from John, then fighting with his barons, Philip intervened without appearing to do so, supporting and disavowing his son by turns. Again when the Church and the needy and fanatical nobility of northern and central France destroyed the feudal dynasty Toulouse, and the rich civilization of the south in the Albigensian crusade, Philip took no part in order to avoid the odium that attached itself to this act of bloody oppression: but it was for him that Simon de Montfort, although he knew it not, conquered Languedoc. Henceforth, except for the English power in Gascony, there was but one royal France embracing the whole kingdom.

As in war, so in peace, Philip Augustus was an efficient sov ereign. If he did not love feudalism, he liked theocracy no bet ter—as is evidenced by his quarrels with Innocent III. He allied himself to the Church on the condition that she was complacent to his designs. He took advantage of her weakness in the midst of a violent age and gave to her the protection of the royal power even in lands beyond his authority. In setting the feudal lords against each other, the king and the Church found a common ad vantage. In furthering his anti-feudal policy Philip similarly ex ploited the wish for security and the instinct of independence among the townspeople who were demanding henceforth an as sured position in the feudal hierarchy. By means of the communes (q.v.) he was able to make a breach in feudalism and to exercise his royal authority far beyond his own demesne. He did yet more: he gave to the monarchy instruments of government of which it was still in need; at Paris, a council of men of humble birth, but wise and loyal ; in his domains, bailiffs or seneschals, all-powerful against the great nobles, but submissive to himself ; a treasury filled by the harsh exploitation of private wealth; an army that was no longer a temporary feudal levy, but a permanent royal force; and, finally, a fixed capital where the university sprang up about the towers of Notre Dame. So strong had the monarchy become that the son of Philip Augustus was the first of the Cape tians who was not consecrated in his father's lifetime.

Louis VIII. (1223-26) .—Louis VIII. continued his father's work by the acquisition of Poitou from Henry III. of England and of Languedoc from the Albigenses. In distributing great appa nages among his sons he avoided family quarrels such as had brought Henry II. of England to submission, and he facilitated unity by encouraging French customs in the more distant parts of the kingdom. But he lacked the time to reveal his capacity, for he died suddenly in 1226, leaving a foreign wife and infant son, the future Louis IX. behind him. Blanche of Castille assumed the regency and undertook the guardianship of her son, and for nine years she ruled with a strength of character and a farsightedness that frustrated her enemies who had hoped to take their revenge for Bouvines. In 1227 and in 1229 by the treaty of Meaux, she prevented the feudal barons of the east from aiding those of the west who were threatened by Henry III. of England, and she assured the annexation of Languedoc at the same time as, by the marriage of her son with the heiress of Provence, she finally broke the ties that held that country to the German empire.

Louis IX. (1226-70).—But her greatest work was the educa tion of her son. She imbued him with that high morality that inspired not only his private life but the whole conception of king ship to which he remained faithful. In Louis IX. morality, for the first time, entered the domain of politics; his sole aim was the good of the whole world and the reconciliation of all Christians in the name of a general crusade. Not that Louis IX. was a monk. Well-balanced, he inherited and exhibited the qualities of his house—courage, skill and commonsense ; but he added to these a new element—religious fervour, the spirit of Christ. Sometimes, indeed, he was forced to fight, as when the small nobility of the centre of France rebelled under the leadership of Trancavel, vis count of Carcassonne, or when Henry III. of England sought to maintain the English hold on Poitou. After the two victories of Taillebourg and Saintes (1242) Louis imposed terms on Henry III. Then he left for his first crusade in Egypt, which was to end disas trously. Louis indeed preferred negotiations to battles. On his return from Egypt, in the Treaty of Corveil 0258), he concluded with the king of Aragon an agreement which left in his hands the whole country to the south of Roussillon and the Pyrenees, and assured to France, all territory north of the Pyrenees. By the treaty of 1259 with Henry III. in exchange for the recognition of the conquests of Philip Augustus, Louis agreed to return those of his father, Louis VIII.—an example unique in history of a vic torious monarch acting solely in the interests of justice and peace. He won for himself and his kingdom a moral authority that made of him a universal arbiter : the oak of Vincennes under which, as it is said, he delighted to administer justice, cast its shade over all his policy. Thus peace was established among the princes, and justice decided no longer by battle, but by law. He intervened in the interests of serfs ; he granted privileges to townspeople ; and in the famous Livre des Metiers, was founded the first statute of a social order organized on Christian principles. Having accom plished all this and, notwithstanding his former failure, against the advice of his mother and his counsellors and even of the pope him self, Louis IX. embarked on the crusade to Tunis in which he met his death on Aug. 25, 12 70.

Philip the Bold (1270-85).

His son and successor, Philip III. departed from the wise traditions of Capetian policy. The death of Alfonse of Poitiers in the expedition to Tunis meant that as well as the crown of France, Philip inherited Toulouse, Poitou, Auvergne, and the marquisate of Provence. The death of the king of Navarre and count of Champagne and Brie (q.v.) in 1273 left his heir a girl of 3 in Philip's hands. Champagne and Brie were annexed to the crown and a marriage between the heiress and the king's second son (Philip, later Philip IV.) arranged. These successes and the temporary success of Charles of Anjou (q.v.) in southern Italy encouraged Philip to look outside the boundaries of France for conquests. But the Sicilian Vespers (q.v.) ended the hopes of Charles of Anjou in Italy in 1282 and Philip's attempt to win the crown of Aragon for his son failed in 1285. Philip III. died on his return. It was time for a commonsense ruler to make an end to these distant adventures for which the France of that day was not ready.

Philip the Fair (1285-1314) .

The new king, by methods completely opposite to those of St. Louis, won for his kingdom a pre-eminent position in Europe. His policy was simple. He sought to bring feudalism and the papacy into subjection to the monarchy by means of a more and more centralized administration. In his realism and his prudent ambition, and still more in his method of government, Philip was a man of the modern world. With him the French monarchy formulated its ambitions and changed by degrees its feudal and ecclesiastical character for a legal constitution. His progressive and aggressive policy and his ruthless financial legis lation were carried out by those lawyers of Normandy, or the south, who had been brought up in the school of Roman law, in the uni versities of Bologna and of Montpellier, raising themselves little by little to the political stage, and who were now leading the king and filling his parlement. It was no longer on religion or on morals, but on imperial and Roman law, that the chevaliers es lois based the omnipotence of the ruler. Nothing indicates more clearly the new tradition which was growing up than this fact—all the great events in the reign of Philip the Fair were given at any rate the appearance of legal process. The first of these was with the papacy. The famous quarrel between papacy and empire had ended in the victory of the former. A new quarrel was opened by Boniface VIII. with the kings of France and England. As vicar of Christ, the pope insisted that the temporal princes should render him the same obedience as they owed to God—an obedience not only spiritual, but temporal. And thus, in effect, they laid claim to the benefices of all Christendom and refused to admit that any king could demand tithes from the clergy without the consent of the pope. The quarrel began in 1294. The bull Clericis laicos definitely forbade the clergy to pay taxes to the lay power. The king, whose expenses had increased with his conquests, and who had no reve nues beyond those derived from his domains, was always short of money. The feudal lords, ruined by the crusades, and the lower classes, fleeced by every one, could give but little. As in all times of crisis, Philip forbade the export of gold or silver from the king dom. Thus deprived of his revenues from the French clergy, Boni face protested in vain. Philip's expenses were constantly increas ing and he took violent measures to improve his financial position. Everyone who had dealings with him resented the constant at tempts to raise money by tampering with the coinage. He both issued bad money and ordered by proclamation the value that should be put on it. Papal pretensions to interference in any mat ters that touched Philip's financial or political position could not be borne by the king and he used the meeting of National repre sentatives, the States-General, to support the national cause against the pope. In a meeting in 1302 protests against papal op pression were made. Boniface determined to win the support of a council against Philip, whose ministers replied with a display of freedom of thought that was centuries in advance of the age. Nogaret travelled to Anagni, where he seized the person of Boni face with the object of bringing him, in his turn, before a council. A month later the pope became insane, and died : the Capetians had conquered where the Hohenstaufen had failed. The Roman theocracy, which had thought to see its dream realized in the jubilee of 1300, found itself confronted by the captivity of the papacy at Avignon, the internecine quarrels of the Great Schism, the vain efforts of councils for reform, and, before a century had passed by, the sweeping and heretical solutions of Wycliffe and Hus.

The affair of the Templars, also a matter of money, was an other legal process carried out by Nogaret. As a military and re ligious order, the Templars had no longer any raison d'ętre; further, the order had the misfortune to be international and to have sided with Boniface, but its greatest crime was its wealth— for great financial powers become speedily unpopular : the Jews and the Lombards had already aroused popular dislike and envy. Philip made use of this hatred among the people, and also of the weakness of his creature, Pope Clement V. The trial of the order, though disguised under the imposing names of religion and moral ity, was in truth a political affair (1307-13) ; and this astonishing conclusion to the crusades resulted in a vast scheme of seculariza tion that was the precursor of those in the 16th and 18th centuries.

Philip's foreign policy had the same litigious character. He in stituted suits against his natural enemies—the duke of Guienne (king of England) and the count of Flanders, the former as power ful as his suzerain, and the latter at once the vassal of two rival sovereigns, the king of France and the emperor of Germany. Philip began his reign by settling the Sicilian and Aragonese adventures that he had inherited from his father. Then he seized upon a quarrel between English and French sailors to institute his cus tomary legal procedure : a citation of the king of England before the parlement of Paris, and in case of default, a forfeiture to be followed by execution, that is to say, by the seizure of Guienne (1295). A truce brought about through the mediation of Boniface VIII. restored Guienne to Edward I., gave him Philip's sister as wife, and promised him the hand of Philip's daughter for his son (1298).

By a still more prolonged and unhappy law-suit Philip sought to incorporate Flanders within his kingdom (1297-1312). Guy de Dampierre, who was lord of the country, had desired to marry his daughter to the eldest son of Edward I. without the permission of his suzerain. Arrested and imprisoned in the Louvre, he was forced to deliver up Flanders (1297) ; but when Jacques de Chatillon attempted in the king's name to take possession, he found himself confronted by a rising of powerful counts and of turbulent and haughty republics of merchants and weavers, who had need of English wool for weaving the cloth that was the staple product of the land. The Flemish infantry overthrew the chivalry of France at Courtrai (1302) in a battle that heralded the disasters of the Hundred Years' War (q.v.). By the Treaty of Athis-sur Orge (1305), which was a veritable masterpiece of chicanery, this luckless venture for France was momentarily settled. Philip secured the French-speaking towns of Lille, Douai and Valen ciennes, but Flanders remained independent.

The efforts of Philip the Fair to expand his territory eastwards met with greater success. His marriage had brought him one of the five great French fiefs—Champagne with Brie. Hard cash en abled him to extend his influence over the county of Chartres, Bar, the Lorraine bishoprics and Franche-Comte and to acquire Lyons and the Vivarais. Thus he removed the threat of encircle ment which had been the preoccupation of the early Capetians. Disdaining the dream of imperial honours that haunted the mind of his brother and the lawyers, he turned all his energies towards the eastern frontier, the line of least resistance, which might have yielded had it not been for his death at the age of 46 (1314) and for the Hundred Years' War.

The Sons of Philip the Fair, 1314-1328.

His three sons con tinued his work. Louis X. mastered the feudal reaction provoked in 1314 by the terrorist methods of his father's jurists. But in order to save the administrative and political gains of his prede cessors, he was compelled to sacrifice Enguerrand de Marigny, his minister of finance, to the mob fury roused by taxation as severe as it was necessary. Philip V. succeeded to the throne because Louis had only a daughter, and Charles IV. followed Philip V. for the same reason, for it was impossible to permit France to be brought as a dowry to a strange prince. This precedent came to be known as the Salic Law, yet it amounted to nothing more than the feudal rule that the whole domain returned to the crown in default of a male heir. Under these eventless reigns, and thanks also to troubles in Germany and England, the development of the king dom went on apace. In particular, under that born organizer, Philip V., the administration was improved by the development of the judicial and financial departments out of the Conseil du roi. But with these kings the male line of Hugh Capet at last failed. For three centuries and a half they had laboured greatly in found ing a kingdom, a kingship, and administrative institutions. Under Hugh Capet in 987 the territory of France was scarcely as great as two French departments of the present day; by 1328 it was equal in extent to S9 departments. The political unity of the king dom was no longer impeded by some 15 great seignorial districts, but by four isolated fiefs: Flanders in the north, Brittany in the west, Burgundy in the east and Guienne in the south. For a long time unsettled, the capital was now established in the Louvre, which had been fortified by Philip Augustus. Like the fiefs, feud alism had been broken into pieces. The Capetians, though not of royal origin, had known how to create around them an adminis trative system in order to achieve order and centralization—the royal treasury of the Louvre; the chambre des comptes; the parlement dealing out a justice common to the whole realm ; a royal currency ; local representatives, provosts, bailiffs or senes chals. Two adversaries alone might have been dangerous ; but one, the Church, was now a captive in Avignon, and the second, the people, although they protested strongly against the taxes, had greatly prospered (if one may judge from the great booty captured by the English) and were consenting to efface themselves in the States-General behind the royal will. This well-established author ity was also aided by the memory of Saint Louis, and it was through the strength of this ideal that the royal prerogative sur vived the Hundred Years' War in the course of which a unified monarchy arose and feudalism met its death.