FRANCE AND ITS VASSAL STATES UNDER THE LAST CAROLINGIANS AND THE EARLY
CAPETIANS, 929–1108[4]
The last Carolingians—Hugh the Great—Election of Hugh Capet, and its
results—The first four Capetians, Hugh, Robert II.,
Henry I., Philip I.—The great Fiefs under the early
Capetians—Normandy—Brittany—Flanders—Vermandois—Champagne and
Blois—Anjou—Burgundy—Aquitaine and Poitou—Toulouse—Beginnings of
French influence.
[Sidenote: The last Carolingian Kings of the West Franks.]
While the first great Saxon kings were reviving the power of their
eastern kingdom, the expiring Carolingian house still carried on an
unavailing struggle for the possession of the old realm of the West
Franks. Charles the Simple was the last Carolingian to exercise any real
authority in France. He had obtained a powerful ally by his concession
of Normandy to Rolf and his vikings. He had witnessed the revolt of the
Lotharingians from Germany to France, and had attained many successes
through their support. [Sidenote: Charles the Simple, 896–929.] Yet the
concluding years of his reign were troubled in the extreme, until he
succumbed before the formidable coalition of Robert, Count of Paris, the
brother of the dead King Odo, and the chief representative of the new
order, with his two mighty sons-in-law, Herbert, Count of Vermandois,
and Rudolf, Duke of Burgundy. [Sidenote: Robert, 922–923.] Robert got
himself crowned king in 922, but was slain in battle in 923, leaving his
famous son, Hugh the Great, too young to succeed to his disputed
kingdom. This left Rudolf of Burgundy as king of the Franks, or, rather,
of those who still resisted Charles the Simple [see Period I., pp.
503–5]. [Sidenote: Rudolf, 923–936.] When Charles died in prison in 929,
Rudolf had no longer a nominal rival. He reigned until his death in 936.
But his power was miserably weak, and real authority still resided with
the great feudatories, whose possessions had now become hereditary for
so long a time that they were now associated by close ties to the
districts which they ruled.
Hugh the Great was a man of very different calibre from his fierce
ancestors. Robert the Strong, the founder of the house, had been a
warrior pure and simple. His sons, Odo and Robert, the two dukes who had
in turn grasped the sceptre, had faithfully followed in his footsteps.
Wanting in policy and statecraft, they had been less powerful as kings
than as dukes. Hugh the Great, the first statesman of the Robertian
house, was a shrewd tactician, who saw that his fortunes could best be
established by playing a waiting game. [Sidenote: Policy of Hugh the
Great.] He heaped up treasure, and accumulated fresh fiefs, but on the
death of his Burgundian brother-in-law he declined the royal dignity,
preferring to exercise an unseen influence over a king of his own choice
to exposing himself to the certainty of exciting the jealousy of every
great lord in France, by raising himself above them as their king.
[Sidenote: Louis IV., 936–954.]
There was only one sacred family which every lord admitted to be above
himself. Even in its humiliation the Carolingian name was still one to
conjure with. As Hugh would not be king himself, he wisely fell back on
the legitimate stock of the West Frankish royal house. He turned his
eyes over the Channel, where Louis, son of Charles the Simple, and his
West Saxon queen, Eadgifu, daughter of Edward the Elder, was living
quietly at the court of his uncle Athelstan. Louis was only fifteen
years old, and was likely to be grateful to his powerful protector. He
was elected king by the Frankish lords, and duly crowned at Reims. In
memory of his exile he was called ‘Louis from beyond sea’
(_Ultramarinus_, _Outremer_). In the list of French kings he is reckoned
as Louis IV.
Hugh the Great was rewarded by the renewal in his favour of the title
‘Duke of the French,’ which had already been borne by his father Robert
in the days of Charles the Simple. This title suggested a power, half
military and half national, analogous to that held by the dukes of the
nations in Germany. [Sidenote: The Duke of the French.] But if this were
the case, Hugh’s power as duke would have probably been restricted to
‘Francia,’ a region which, in common speech, was now limited to the
Gaulish regions north of the Seine. It is not clear, however, that the
power of the Duke of the French had any territorial limitation other
than that of the limits of the West Frankish kingdom as prescribed by
the treaty of Verdun. Wherever Louis ruled as ‘king,’ Hugh wielded
authority as ‘duke.’ He was a permanent prime minister, a mayor of the
palace, a justiciar of the Anglo-Norman type, rather than a territorial
duke. Indeed, Hugh’s chief domains were not in ‘Francia’ at all. Despite
his possession of Paris, his chief fiefs were still in the cradle of his
house, the district between the Seine and Loire, to which the term
Neustria was now commonly applied. Here his authority stretched as far
westwards as the county of Maine, which he had obtained in his youth
from the weakness of Rudolf of Burgundy. Moreover, in the lack of all
central royal authority, half the chief vassals of the north had thought
it prudent to commend themselves to the mighty lord of Neustria, and,
with the Duke of Normandy at their head, had become his feudal
dependants. Hugh was no longer simply a great feudatory. Even in name,
he was the second man in Gaul. In fact, he was a long way the first.
The last Carolingians were in no wise puppets and do-nothings like the
last Merovingians. Louis IV. proved a strenuous warrior, with a full
sense of his royal dignity. He ruled directly over little more than the
hill-town of Laon and its neighbourhood, but he did wonders with his
scanty resources. He married a sister of Otto the Great, and with German
help was able to press severely his former patron. But Otto soon
withdrew beyond the Rhine, and Louis, deprived of his help, and ever
planning schemes too vast for his resources, was soon altogether at
Hugh’s mercy. In 946 he was driven out of Laon: ‘the only town,’ as he
complained, ‘where I could shut myself up with my wife and children, the
town that I prefer to my life.’ In his despair he laid his wrongs before
King Otto and a council of bishops at Ingelheim. Hugh prudently yielded
before the threatened thunders of the Church. He renewed his homage to
King Louis, and restored Laon to him. ‘Henceforth,’ says the chronicler,
‘their friendship was as firm as their struggles had formerly been
violent.’ When Louis died suddenly in 954, his thirteen-year-old son,
Lothair, was chosen king through Hugh’s influence. Two years later the
great duke died.
Hugh the Great’s son and successor was also named Hugh. He is famous in
history by the surname of ‘Capet,’ which he obtained from bearing the
cope of the abbot of St. Martin’s at Tours, but which, like most famous
surnames, has no contemporary authority. Brought up in his father’s
school, he was clear-headed, cunning, resourceful, and cold-blooded.
[Sidenote: Hugh Capet and King Lothair, 954–986.] He soon extended the
power of his house, establishing one of his brothers in Burgundy, and
marrying Adelaide, the heiress of Poitou, so as to be able to push
forward claims in the lands beyond the Loire. Both in policy and
resources he overmatched the young king Lothair, who tried as he grew up
to play his father’s part; but his means were too small, and he embarked
on contradictory policies which destroyed each other. His father had
relied upon the support of Otto I., but Lothair, tempted by the long
tradition of loyalty which bound Lotharingia to the Carolingian house,
sought to find a substitute for his dwindling patrimony in northern
France by winning domains for himself in that region. The strong Saxon
kings would not tolerate the falling away of Lorraine from their Empire.
Otto II. invaded France [see page 38] and vigorously punished the
presumptuous Carolingian. Henceforth Lothair had no support against the
subtle policy of the new Duke of the French. He even alienated Adalbero,
the famous Archbishop of Reims, and the last prominent ecclesiastical
upholder of the tottering dynasty, so that he repudiated the traditional
policy of his see, and allied himself with the duke and the Emperor.
Gerbert, the ‘scholasticus’ of Adalbero’s cathedral school, and the
author of his policy, established an alliance between Hugh Capet and
Otto III., and was soon able to boast that Lothair was but king in name,
and that the real king was Duke Hugh. After losing the support of the
Germans and of the Church, the Carolingians had absolutely nothing left
but their own paltry resources. Yet Lothair gallantly struggled on till
his death, in 986, after a nominal reign of thirty-two years. [Sidenote:
Louis V., 986–987.] His son, Louis V., who had reigned jointly with him
since 979, succeeded to his phantom kingship, and contrived to win over
Duke Hugh, at whose instigation he led an expedition into Poitou. But
Louis also quarrelled with Archbishop Adalbero, and alienated the
Church. Adalbero intrigued against him, and the prelate’s triumph was
hastened by Louis’ premature death in the hunting-field (987). He was
the last of the Carolingian kings.
[Sidenote: Election of Hugh Capet, 987.]
For a century the Robertian house had struggled with the house of
Charles the Great. Its premature triumph under Odo and Robert had put
off the final day of success. But the patient and shrewd policy of Hugh
the Great and Hugh Capet was at last rewarded with victory. Louis V.
left no son. His uncle Charles, Duke of Lower Lorraine, was his nearest
heir, but was in no position to push forward his pretensions. The pear
was at last ripe, and Hugh Capet had no longer any motive for avoiding
the semblance of the power, of which he had long enjoyed the reality.
Adalbero and Gerbert now showed great activity. Adalbero harangued the
barons and bishops on the duty that lay before them. ‘We know,’ he said,
‘that Charles of Lorraine has his partisans who pretend that the throne
belongs to him by hereditary right. But we believe that kingship is not
acquired by hereditary right, but that we ought only to raise to that
dignity the man who is marked out, not only by nobleness of birth, but
by wisdom, loyalty, and magnanimity.’ The magnates took the cue, and
elected Hugh king of the French. The Church ratified the choice of the
nobles by the solemn coronation of the new king at Noyon. The Duke of
the Normans and the Count of Anjou lent him the support of their arms.
The Emperor recognised Hugh, on condition that he waived all claims over
Lotharingia.
The revolution of 987 was easily accomplished, because the old order was
so nearly dead. It involved no striking change in form. The Capetian
kings posed as the lawful successors of the Carolingians: they had the
same conceptions of sovereignty, and followed the same principles of
government. [Sidenote: Its results.] Yet those are not far wrong who
regard the accession of Hugh as the starting-point of all later French
history. It is easy to exaggerate the nature of the change. It is unsafe
to make the change of dynasty a triumph of one race over another. It has
been the fashion to say that, with the last of the Carolingians,
disappear the last of the Teutonic conquerors of Gaul, and that their
power had passed on to the Romanised Celts whom they had ruled so long.
But there is no scrap of evidence to prove that the later Carolings were
different in tongue, ideas, or policy from the Robertian house. There
was no real national feeling in the tenth century, and, if there were,
no proof that the one house was more national than the other.
Nevertheless, the passing away of the line of Charles the Great does
complete the process which the Treaty of Verdun had begun. The Capetian
king had a limited localised power, a power that in due course could
become national; and if he looked back, like the Carolings, to the
traditions of imperial monarchy and order, he had no temptation to look
back, as the Carolings were bound to look back, to the imperial ideas of
universal dominion. He had no claim to rule beyond the limits ascribed
to the West Frankish kingdom in the Treaty of Verdun. He was king of the
French, the new Romance people that had grown up as the result of the
amalgamation of conquering Frank and conquered Roman. He spoke the
infant French tongue; his ambitions were limited to French soil; he
represented the new nationality that soon began to take a foremost place
amidst all the nations of Europe. But the triumph of the Capetian was
not even in anticipation a simple national triumph. It was only in after
ages, when France had become great, that she could look back and see in
his accession the beginnings of her separate national monarchy.
Personally, Hugh Capet was doubtless, like Harold of England some two
generations later, an embodiment of the new national character and
energy. But, less fortunate than Harold, he had time enough to live to
show how powerless was a national hero, amidst an order of society in
which the national ideal could have no place. He was rather the mighty
feudatory, raised by his own order to a position of pre-eminence to
represent the predominance of feudal ideas. The Carolings had fallen,
not because of their own weakness, and still less by reason of any want
of sympathy between them and the French nation. They were pushed out of
power because France had become so fully feudalised that there was no
room for an authority that had no solid basis of feudal support. France
had become divided among a series of great fiefs. None of these fiefs
fell to the ruling family, which was thus, as the result of the
preponderance of the feudal principle, deprived of revenue, army, lands,
and reputation. Hugh Capet inherited all that had kept the Carolingian
power alive so long; but in addition to that he could supplement the
theoretical claims of monarchy by right divine, by the practical
arguments drawn from the possession of one of the strongest fiefs. Thus
the new dynasty saved the monarchy by strengthening it with a great
fief. No doubt the feudatories acted unwisely in having a king at all.
But a nominal monarchy was part of the feudal system, and the barons
could console themselves by believing that in becoming king of the
French, Hugh still remained one of themselves. He was not surrounded
with the mystic reverence due to the descendants of Charlemagne. As
Harold, in becoming king of the English, did not cease to be earl of the
West Saxons, so Hugh, in ascending the French throne, was still in all
essentials the duke of the French. Harold and Hugh alike found but a
questioning obedience in the great earls and counts, who looked upon the
upstart kings as their equals. The Norman Conquest destroyed Harold
before it could be early demonstrated what a long step in the direction
of feudalism was made by his accession. Hugh Capet and his successors
had time to bear the full brunt of the feudal shock. The most powerful
of dukes proved the weakest of kings. It was only gradually that the
ceremonial centre, round which the cumbrous fabric of French feudalism
revolved, became the real heart of French national life. Yet, even in
the feeble reigns of the first four Capetian kings, it is plain that
France had begun a new existence. The history of the Carolingians is a
history of decline. The history of the Capetians is a story of progress.
While beyond the Rhine and Alps the continuance of the imperial theory
choked the growth of German and Italian national life, the disappearance
of these remnants of the past proved a blessing to Gaul. The history of
modern Europe is the history of the development of nationalities. That
history may be said in a sense to begin with the establishment of the
first of an unbroken dynasty of national kings over what was destined to
become one of the greatest of modern nations.
It is only with these limitations that the election of Hugh can be
regarded as a triumph either of feudalism or of nationality. But it is
entirely true that Hugh’s accession was the triumph of the Church.
Adalbero, and Gerbert working through Adalbero, really gave Hugh the
throne. Gerbert could truly boast that the Church had revived the royal
name after it had long been almost dead among the French. Amidst the
horrors of feudal anarchy, the sounder part of the Church still upheld
in monarchy the Roman tradition of orderly rule, and taught that the
king governed by God’s grace, because without a strong king the thousand
petty tyrants of feudalism would have no restraint upon their lust and
greed. But even this was an ideal far beyond the vision of the tenth
century; though in later generations it was to bear fruit. The immediate
results of Hugh Capet’s election were far different from its ultimate
results. The conditions upon which his brother magnates had elected him
king meant in practice that they should enjoy in their territories the
same power that he enjoyed on his own domain. Save his theoretical
pre-eminence, Hugh got very little from his royal title. The only
resources on which he could depend implicitly were those which he
derived from his own lands and vassals. There was no national
organisation, no royal revenue, and practically no royal army, as the
term of feudal service was too short to carry on a real campaign, even
if the king could have trusted his vassals’ levies. The royal title
involved responsibilities, but brought with it little corresponding
power.
Struck by the contrast between their weakness and the commanding
position of later French kings, historians have dwelt with almost
exaggerated emphasis on the powerlessness of Hugh Capet and his first
three successors. Yet the early Capetians were not so feeble as they are
sometimes described. The French king was still the centre round which
the feudal system revolved. He had a store of legal claims and
traditions of authority, which at any favourable moment he could put
into force. He was the only ruler whose authority extended even in name
all over France. He inherited the traditions of the Carolingians and
Merovingians, and, rightly or wrongly, was regarded as their successor.
Moreover, the lay fiefs were, luckily for the monarchy, cut up by the
great ecclesiastical territories, over which the king stood in a better
position. Though feudal in a certain sense, the great Church dignitary
was never a mere feudalist. His power was not hereditary. On his death
the custody of the temporalities of his see passed into the royal hands,
and it was the settled royal policy to keep churches vacant as long as
possible. Only in a few favoured fiefs, like Normandy, Brittany, and
Aquitaine, did the _regale_ slip altogether into the hands of the local
dukes. Moreover, the disputes and the weakness of the chapters gave the
king the preponderating voice in elections. Even stronger was the royal
position in relation to the monasteries. The greatest abbeys throughout
France were ‘royal abbeys,’ over which the king possessed the same right
as over bishoprics. Weaker than the bishops, the abbots looked up even
more than the secular prelates to the royal support against the grasping
and simoniacal lay-lords. The king favoured the Cluniac reformers,
knowing that the more earnest the Churchmen, the more they would be
opposed to feudal influence. Thus it was that every great Church fief
was a centre of royal influence. Over the Church lands of central
France—the provinces of Sens, Reims, Tours, and Bourges—the early
Capetian was a real king. Even from the point of view of material
resources, the king was in every whit as favourable a position as any
one of his chief vassals. His own domains were large, rich, and
centrally situated. Though lavish grants to the chief monasteries, and
the need of paying for each step of their upward progress by
conciliating the feudal magnates, had eaten away much of the old
Robertian domain; though the great Counts of Anjou and Blois had
established themselves in virtual independence within the limits of the
domain of Hugh the Great, Hugh Capet still held the country between the
Seine and the Loire, including the county of Paris, Orléans and its
district, Senlis, Etampes, and Melun, with scattered possessions in more
distant places, Picardy, Champagne, Berri, Touraine, and Auvergne. Paris
was not as yet so important a place as it afterwards became, and it is
an exaggeration to make it the centre of his power. Hugh could only
conciliate his chief adviser and supporter, Bouchard the Venerable, the
greatest lord of the royal domain, and count already of Vendôme,
Corbeil, and Melun, by granting him his own county of Paris. The title
of ‘royal count’ of Paris suggested that Bouchard was a royal officer
rather than a simple feudatory, and after Bouchard had retired into a
monastery, the county of Paris was henceforth kept strictly in the
king’s hands. The second Capetian acquired with Montreuil-sur-Mer a
seaport near the English Channel. For a time the Capetians held the
duchy of Burgundy. Moreover, they were men of energy and vigour who made
the best of their limited resources. But their lot was a hard one. Even
in their own domains, between the Seine and Loire, the leading mesne
lords, lay and secular, exercised such extensive jurisdiction that there
was little room left for the authority of the suzerain. Besides the
task—as yet hopeless—of reducing the great vassals of the crown to
order, the Capetian kings had the preliminary task of establishing their
authority within their own domains. Even this smaller work was not
accomplished for more than a century. But, luckily for the kings, each
one of the great feudatories was similarly occupied. The barons of
Normandy and Aquitaine gave more trouble to their respective dukes than
the barons of the Isle of France gave to the lord of Paris. Power was in
reality distributed among hundreds of feudal chieftains. It was so
divided that no one was strong enough to really rule at all. France
suffered all the miseries of feudal anarchy, when every petty lord of a
castle ruled like a little king over his own domain. Yet it was
something that her contests were now between Frenchmen and Frenchmen.
Something was gained in the passing away of the barbarian invasions of
the tenth century.
[Sidenote: The first four Capetians. Hugh, 987–996.]
The details of the political history of the first four Capetian reigns
are insignificant, and need not be told at length. Hugh Capet reigned
from 987 to 996. He had little difficulty in obtaining general
recognition, even from the lords of the distant south. But he had some
trouble in upholding his claims against the Carolingian claimant,
Charles, Duke of Lower Lorraine, who received the powerful support of
the church of Reims, after Adalbero’s death, and continued for some time
to maintain himself in the old Carolingian fortress of Laon. Hugh
continued with wise policy to maintain his hold over the church of
Reims, and so to destroy the last possible stronghold of the
Carolingians. He did not even scruple to sacrifice the trusty Gerbert to
serve his dynastic ambitions. Within modest limits, the reign of the
founder of the new dynasty was a successful one.
[Sidenote: Robert II., the Pious, 996–1031.]
In the very year of his accession, Hugh provided for the hereditary
transmission of his power by associating his son Robert in the kingship.
On Hugh’s death Robert, already with nine years’ experience as a crowned
king, became sole monarch. He had been a pupil of Gerbert’s, and was
sufficiently learned to be able to compose hymns and argue on points of
theology with bishops. His character was amiable, his charity abundant;
he was of soft and ready speech, and amiable manners. He showed such
fervent devotion that he was surnamed Robert the Pious, and contributed
more than any other Capetian king to identify the Church and the
dynasty. He was not the weak uxorious prince that his enemies describe
him, but a mighty hunter, a vigorous warrior, and an active statesman.
He made constant efforts, both to enlarge his domain and establish his
authority over the great vassals. He kept up friendly relations with
Normandy. He married Bertha, widow of Odo I., Count of Chartres, Tours,
and Blois, his father’s worst enemy, in the hope of regaining the three
rich counties that had slipped away from the heritage of Hugh the Great.
But Bertha was within the prohibited degrees; and the Pope insisting
upon the unlawfulness of the union, Robert was excommunicated, and after
a long struggle gave her up. But in 1019, the establishment of Odo II.
of Blois, the son of Bertha by her former marriage, in the county of
Troyes, did something to avenge the lady’s memory. Robert’s third
marriage with Constance of Arles, the daughter of a Provençal lord, led
to several royal visits to his wife’s native regions which was a step
towards establishing Capetian influence in the south. But the men of
Robert’s own territories disliked the hard, greedy queen, and the clergy
in particular resented her introduction, into the court of Paris, of the
refined but lax southern manners. Robert’s most important exploit was
the conquest of Burgundy. His uncle, Duke Henry, had died without an
heir, and after a struggle of fourteen years’ duration, Robert got
possession of the great fief; but he soon granted it to his eldest
surviving son Henry, whom, faithful to his father’s policy, he had
crowned king in 1027. He twice went on pilgrimage to Rome, and was
offered the throne of Italy by the Lombard lords, who were opposed to
Conrad the Salic; yet he found much difficulty in chastising any petty
lord of the Orléanais or the Beauce, who chose to defy him.
[Sidenote: Henry I., 1031–1060.]
During the declining years of Robert II., Queen Constance exercised an
increasing influence. She wished to set aside the young king, Henry of
Burgundy, the natural heir, in favour of his younger brother Robert. But
the old king insisted on the rights of the first-born, and civil war
broke out between the brothers, though before long they united their
arms against their father. When King Robert died, the contest was
renewed; but finally Henry secured the throne for himself, and pacified
his younger brother by the grant of Burgundy, which thus went
permanently back to a separate line of rulers. Henry I.’s inauspicious
beginning lost some ground to the monarchy, which under him perhaps
attained its lowest point of power. But Henry, if not very wise, was
brave and active. Though his resources prevented any great expeditions,
he strove by a series of petty fights and sieges to protect his
frontiers against two of the strongest and most disloyal of his
vassals—the Count of Blois, and the Duke of Normandy. In neither case
was he successful. Odo II., after a long struggle, was able to establish
his power on a firm basis, both in Champagne and Blois. But after Odo’s
death in 1037, Henry managed to absorb some of his fiefs in the royal
domain, and scored a considerable triumph by transferring Touraine from
the overpowerful house of Blois to Geoffrey Martel, Count of Anjou. The
young duke, William of Normandy, who owed his throne to the support of
Henry, which had secured the defeat of the rebel barons at Val-ès-Dunes,
soon grew so powerful as to excite the apprehensions of his overlord. In
an unlucky hour, Henry broke the tradition of friendship that had so
long united Rouen and Paris. He twice invaded Normandy, but on both
occasions the future conqueror of England proved more than a match for
him. In 1054 Henry was defeated at Mortemer, and again, in 1058, at
Varaville. Another difficulty in the way of the monarchy was the fact
that Henry married late, and his health was already breaking up when the
eldest son, borne to him by his wife Anne of Russia, was still a child.
Nevertheless, in 1059, Henry procured the coronation of his
seven-year-old son Philip at Reims, and the great gathering of magnates
from all parts of France that attended the ceremony showed that the
succession to the throne was still an event of national interest. Yet
with all his weakness, Henry I. held firm to the ancient traditions of
the Frankish monarchy. When the reforming Pope Leo IX. held his synod of
Reims to denounce simony, Henry was so jealous of the Pope that he
prevented the French prelates from attending it. He watched with alarm
the results of the absorption of Lorraine and the kingdom of Arles in
the Empire, and boldly wrote to Henry III., claiming by hereditary right
the palace at Aachen, possessed by his ancestors, and all the
Lotharingian kingdom kept from its rightful owners by the tyranny of the
German king. It is significant that the weakest of the early Capetians
should thus pose against the strongest of the Emperors as the inheritor
of the Carolingian tradition.
[Sidenote: Philip I., 1060–1108.]
In 1060 Henry died, and the little Philip I. was acknowledged as his
successor without a murmur. During his minority, Count Baldwin V. of
Flanders held the regency, paying perhaps more regard to his interests
as a great feudatory, than to his duty to his ward. It was possibly
owing to this attitude that Baldwin allowed his son-in-law, William the
Bastard, to fit out the famous expedition which led to the conquest of
England, and thus gave one of the chief vassals of France a stronger
position than his overlord. The year after the battle of Hastings
Baldwin of Flanders died, and henceforward Philip ruled in his own name.
As he grew up, he gained a bad reputation for greed, debauchery,
idleness, and sloth. Before he attained old age he had become
extraordinarily fat and unwieldy, while ill-health still further
diminished his activity. Yet Philip was a shrewd man, of sharp and
biting speech, and clear political vision. His quarrel with the Church
was the result of his private vices rather than his public policy. As
early as 1073 he was bitterly denounced by Gregory VII. as the most
simoniac, adulterous, and sacrilegious of kings. But he gave most
offence to the Church when, in 1092, he repudiated his wife, Bertha of
Holland (with whom he had lived for more than twenty years), in favour
of Bertrada of Montfort, the wife of Fulk Réchin, Count of Anjou, whom
he married after a complaisant bishop had declared her former union
null. This bold step brought on Philip’s head not only the arms of the
injured Fulk, and of Bertha’s kinsfolk, but a sentence of
excommunication from Urban II. (1094). Though a way to reconciliation
was soon opened up by the death of Bertha, the Pope nevertheless
persisted in requiring Philip to repudiate his adulterous consort.
Philip never gave up Bertrada, and never received the full absolution of
the Church. Nevertheless, the war which he carried on against the Papacy
did not cost him the allegiance of his subjects, though to it was added
a long conflict with Gregory VII.’s ally, William the Conqueror. So weak
was he that he dared not prevent the holding of councils on French soil
at which he was excommunicated, and the great crusading movement
proclaimed. But Philip was more active and more shrewd than his
ecclesiastical enemies thought. He turned his attention with
single-minded energy towards the increase of the royal domain,
preferring the inglorious gain of a castle or a petty lordship to
indulging in those vague and futile claims by which his three
predecessors had sought in vain to hide their powerlessness. He took
possession of the lapsed fief of Vermandois, and, not being strong
enough to hold the district in his own hands, established there his
brother Hugh the Great, the famous crusading hero and the father of a
long line of Capetian counts of Vermandois, who were all through the
next century among the surest supports of the Capetian throne. Philip
also absorbed the Vexin and the Valois, thus securing important outworks
to protect his city of Paris from Normandy and Champagne. By his politic
purchase of Bourges, Philip for the first time established the royal
power on a solid basis south of the Loire. But the weak point of
Philip’s acquisitions was that he had not force sufficient to hold them
firmly against opposition. Hampered by the constant unfriendliness of
the Church, broken in health and troubled in conscience, he ended his
life miserably enough. Formally reconciled to the Pope before the end of
his days, he died in the habit of a monk, declaring that his sins made
him unworthy to be laid beside his ancestors and St. Denis, and humbly
consigning himself to the protection of St. Benedict. When the vault at
Fleury closed over his remains, French history began a new
starting-point. Philip I. was the last of the early Capetians who were
content to go on reigning without governing, after the fashion of the
later Carolingians. It was reserved for his successors to convert formal
claims into actual possessions. Nevertheless, the work of Philip set
them on the right track. In his shrewd limitation of policy to matters
of practical moment, and his keen insight into the drift of affairs, the
gross, profligate, mocking Philip prepared the way for the truer
expansion of France under his son and grandson. His reign is the bridge
between the period of the early Capetians and the more fruitful and
progressive period that begins with Louis VI.
[Sidenote: The great fiefs under the early Capetians.]
The history of the struggles of the Capetians and Carolingians, and of
the first faint efforts of the former house to realise some of the high
pretensions of the old Frankish monarchy, is only one side of the
history of France during the tenth and eleventh centuries. Divided as
was all the western world, there was no part of it more utterly divided
in feeling and interest than the kingdom of the West Franks. When the
early Capetians were carrying on their petty warfare in the regions
between Seine and Loire, or making their vain progresses and emphasising
their barren claims over more distant regions, half a score of feudal
potentates as able, as wealthy, and as vigorous as themselves were
building up a series of local states with foundations as strong, and
patriotism as intense, as those of the lords of Paris. The tenth and
eleventh centuries saw the consolidation of the provincial nationalities
of France, the growing up of those strong local states which play so
conspicuous a part in later mediæval French history, and which,
centuries after their absorption into the royal domain, continued to be
centres of keen local feeling, and are not crushed out of existence even
by modern patriotism and the levelling-up of the Revolution. Equally
important with their political influence was their influence on arts,
language, and literature. Into the details of this history it is
impossible to go; but without a general survey of the process, we should
lose the key to the subsequent history of France.
[Sidenote: Normandy.]
The first among the great fiefs of France to acquire a distinct
character of its own was Normandy, which since the treaty of
Clair-on-Epte in 911 had been handed over by Charles the Simple to Rolf
the Ganger and his Viking followers. The pirates gave up their wandering
life of plunder, became Christians, and tillers of the soil. Rollo
divided the lands of his duchy among his kinsfolk and followers. In one
or two generations, the descendants of the pirate chieftains became the
turbulent feudal aristocracy that held even their fierce dukes in check,
and found the little duchy too small a field for their ambition and
enterprise. For a time they retained their Norse character. In some
districts, especially in the Bessin and the Côtentin, the great mass of
the population had become Scandinavian in tongue and manners. Constant
relations with Norwegian and Danish kings kept alive the memory of their
old home. Harold Blue Tooth protected Duke Richard against Louis IV.
Swegen sought the help of the lord of Rouen in avenging the massacre of
St. Brice on the English. But the ready wit and quick adaptability of
the Scandinavian races could not long withstand the French influences
surrounding them. The constant friendly relations between the Norman
dukes and both the Carolingian and Capetian kings precipitated the
change. The dukes and barons of Normandy became French in tongue and
manners. But they became French with a difference. The French of Caen
and Rouen were more restless, more enterprising, more ambitious, and
more daring than the French of Paris and Orleans. The contemporary
chroniclers saw the importance of the distinction. ‘O France,’ says Dudo
of Saint-Quentin, ‘thou wert crushed to the earth. Behold, there comes
to thee a new race from Denmark. Peace is made between her and thee.
That race will raise thy name and thy power to the heavens.’ Nor was
this prophecy a false one. Despite its constant turbulence, Normandy
became filled with a vigorous local life that soon flowed over its own
borders. What the Normans could not teach themselves, they learnt from
wandering Italians or Burgundians. The Normans stood in the forefront of
all the great movements of the time. They upheld the Capetians against
the Carolingians. They became the disciples of Cluny, and from the
Norman abbey of Le Bec soon flowed a stream of culture and civilisation
that bade fair to rival Cluny itself. They covered their land with great
minsters, and wrote stirring _chansons de geste_ in their Norman dialect
of the French tongue. Yet they kept themselves so free of their
suzerain’s influence, that not even through the Church could the
Capetian kings exercise any authority in Normandy. Throughout the whole
province of Rouen, the Church depended either upon the local seigneur or
upon the Norman duke. They were the champions of the Hildebrandine
Papacy. They were foremost in the Crusades. Their duke, William the
Bastard, conquered England, and in the next generation his Norman
followers swarmed over Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Private Norman
adventurers attempted to found a kingdom in Spain, and set up a monarchy
in southern Italy strong enough to wrest Sicily from Islam [see pages
104–118]. Throughout the length and breadth of Europe, Norman warriors,
priests, and poets made the French name famous. With the activity of the
Normans first begins the preponderance of French ideas, customs, and
language throughout the western world.
[Sidenote: Brittany.]
The old Celtic tribal state of Brittany had been almost overwhelmed by
the Norman invasions, and had lost all its former prosperity. The most
sacred shrines of the vast crowd of the Breton saints were pillaged and
destroyed. At the best, the holy relics were transferred to Paris, to
Orléans, or some other safe spot, far away from the marauding pagan.
When Rolf got from Charles the Simple the duchy of Normandy, it is said
that he asked for fresh land to plunder, while his followers learnt the
arts of peace in their new home. In some vague way Charles granted him
rights of suzerainty over Brittany. The Normans harried the land for
another generation, and, as later in Wales and Ireland, many Norman
chieftains settled down in the more fertile eastern districts of Upper
Brittany. But a Celtic reaction followed. Led by Alan of the Twisted
Beard (_barbe torte_), the native Bretons rose against their oppressors
and made common cause with the Gallo-Roman peasantry against them. Alan
became the founder of the county (afterwards duchy) of Brittany, a state
half French and half Celtic, including besides ‘la Bretagne bretonnante’
of the western peninsula of Lower Brittany, the French-speaking lands of
the Lower Loire and the Vilaine, with the purely French town of Rennes
for its capital, and the equally French Nantes for its chief seaport.
But despite the differences of tongue and custom, there was an essential
unity of feeling in the new duchy, based on the disappearance both of
the Celtic tribal system and the Gallo-Roman provincial system in favour
of a feudalism that was common to Celt and Frenchman alike. Brittany,
despite its composite origin, retained and still retains a marked type
of local nationality, less active and energetic than the Norman, but
more dogged, persevering, and enduring. When Alan Barbe-torte died in
952, Brittany had become an organised feudal state.
[Sidenote: Flanders.]
The county of Flanders grew up in the flat country between the Scheldt
and the sea. Like Brittany, it had suffered terribly from Norman
invasions. Like Brittany, it was not homogeneous in language and custom.
In all the northern and eastern districts the Low Dutch tongue
prevailed, but in the south-east, round Lille and Douai, French was
spoken. Baldwin of the Iron Arm, a Carolingian official who became the
son-in-law of Charles the Bald, distinguished himself by leading the
Flemings to victory against the Normans, and obtained from his
father-in-law an hereditary supremacy over the whole district bounded by
the Scheldt, the North Sea, and the Canche, and therefore including the
modern Artois with the homage of great barons like the counts of
Boulogne and Saint-Pol. Four other Counts Baldwin continued their
ancestor’s exploits. Of these the most famous was Baldwin V., the uncle
and guardian of Philip I., and the father-in-law of William the
Conqueror. It was under Baldwin V. that the Flemish towns, whose strong
walls had served to shelter previous generations from the Viking
marauders, first enter upon their long career of political liberty and
industrial prosperity. When Baldwin V. died in 1067, the year after his
son-in-law’s establishment in England, mediæval Flanders had well begun
its glorious but tumultuous and blood-stained career. [Sidenote:
Vermandois.] To the south of Flanders lay the Vermandois, round its
chief town of Saint Quentin, and including the northern parts of the
restricted ‘Francia’ of the tenth century. We have seen the importance
of its counts in the days of the struggle of Carolingians and Capetians,
and the establishment of a Capetian line of counts of Vermandois in the
person of Hugh the Great, the brother of Philip I.
[Sidenote: Champagne and Blois.]
Champagne became the chief fief of north-eastern France. A special
feature in this district was the power of the bishops, and in
consequence the influence of the crown. The metropolitans of Reims
played a great local as well as a great national part. The bishops of
Châlons became counts of their cathedral city; the bishops of Troyes,
the local capital, only just failed in attaining the same end.
‘Everywhere,’ we are told, ‘the mighty oppressed the feeble, and men,
like fishes, swallowed each other up.’ In the course of the tenth
century a strong lay power arose in this district under the counts of
Troyes. During the tenth century the country was held by a branch of the
house of Vermandois. In 1019 it passed, as we have seen, to the house of
Blois. However, the power of the family was soon endangered by the
separation of Champagne and Blois under the two elder sons of Odo II.,
after his death in 1037.
The county of Blois, itself the original seat of the Capetians but
carved out of their dwindling domain in favour of a hostile house, had
already been united with that of Chartres. The establishment of the same
house in Troyes created a state which pressed upon Paris both from the
west, south, and east, and was frequently hostile to it. Before long,
this powerful line began to absorb the lesser feudatories of the eastern
marchland, and to make its influence felt even over the great
ecclesiastical dignitaries. After the county of Vitry was transferred
from the obedience of the Archbishop of Reims to the authority of the
counts of Troyes, the lords of the amalgamated fiefs assumed the wider
title of counts of Champagne, and became one of the greatest powers in
France. Against these gains the loss of Touraine was but a small one.
Odo’s grandson, Stephen, Count of Blois and Chartres (1089–1102), was
one of the heroes of the First Crusade, and the father, by his wife
Adela, daughter of William the Conqueror, of a numerous family in whose
time the house of Blois attained its highest prosperity. His second son,
Theobald (II. of Champagne and IV. of Blois, called Theobald the Great,
died 1152) reigned over both Blois and Champagne. His third son,
Stephen, acquired not only the counties of Mortain and Boulogne but the
throne of England. His fourth son, Henry, was the famous Bishop of
Winchester. Though Blois and Champagne again separated under different
lines of the house of Blois after Theobald’s death, their policy
remained united, and their influence was still formidable.
[Sidenote: Anjou.]
Like Blois, Anjou grew up out of the original domains of Robert the
Strong. Fulk the Red, who died in 941, and was rewarded with Anjou for
his prowess in resisting the Normans, was the first hereditary Count of
Anjou of whom history has any knowledge, though legends tell of earlier
mythical heroes and a witch ancestress, whose taint twisted into evil
the strong passions and high courage of the later representatives of the
race. Though their exploits are told in a somewhat romantic form, there
remains enough to enable us to form more individual impressions of the
fierce, wayward Angevin lords than of most of the shadowy heroes of
early feudalism. With Geoffrey Martel, great-grandson of Fulk the Red,
who died in 1060, the first line of the Counts of Anjou became extinct;
but his sister’s son Geoffrey the Bearded got possession of the county,
and became the ancestor of the famous line that later ages than their
own celebrated as the house of Plantagenet. His descendants grew in
dominions and influence. Touraine they had possessed since Henry I. had
transferred that county from the house of Blois to Geoffrey Martel. They
now turned their eyes on Maine, the border district that separated them
from the Normans. This brought about a long struggle between the Norman
dukes and the Angevin counts, which was not finally ended until Henry I.
of Normandy and England married his daughter, the widowed Empress
Matilda, to Geoffrey the Fair, from which marriage sprang the greatest
of the Angevins, Henry II. of England, Normandy and Anjou.
[Sidenote: Burgundy.]
The duchy of Burgundy was the last remaining great fief of the Capetians
in northern and central France. While various kingdoms, duchies, and
counties of Burgundy grew up, as we have seen, in the imperial lands
beyond the Saône and the Rhone, one Richard the Justiciar, famous like
all the founders of fiefs as a successful foe of the Norman marauders,
became, in 877, the first duke or marquis of that Burgundy which became
a French vassal state. His brother was Boso, founder of the kingdom of
Provence, his brother-in-law was Rudolf, king of Transjurane Burgundy,
and his son was Rudolf, king of the French. His sons succeeded him in
his rule, though for more than a century each successive duke received a
fresh formal appointment; and it was not until a junior branch of the
Capetian house began with Robert the Old (1032–1073), the younger
brother of King Henry I., that the hereditary duchy of Burgundy can be
said to have been definitively established.
[Sidenote: Aquitaine.]
South of the Loire the development of feudal states took even a more
decided form than in the north. In these regions feudal separation had
the freest field to run riot. There was still a nominal duke of
Aquitaine, who might be regarded as having some sort of vague authority
over the old Aquitania that was substantially synonymous with
south-western France; but neither in Gascony, nor Auvergne, nor in La
Marche, nor in the Limousin was any recognition paid to this shadowy
potentate. The duchy of Aquitaine seemed on the verge of sharing the
fate of the kingdom of France and disappearing altogether because it
stood outside the newly grown feudal system, when, like the kingdom of
France, it procured a new lease of life by being granted to a house
that, like the Robertians of Paris, possessed with great fiefs a firm
position in the new system. [Sidenote: Poitou.] In 928 Ebles, Count of
Poitou, received a grant of the duchy of Aquitaine, and in 951 William
Tow-head, his son by a daughter of Edward the Elder of Wessex, was
confirmed in his father’s possession by Louis d’Outremer. The county
that took its name from Poitiers was a substantial inheritance. It was
the marchland that divided north and south, but its main characteristics
were those of the north. Its uplands seldom permit the cultivation of
the vine, and its manners, like its climate and tongue, were northern.
As the dialects of Romance became differentiated, Poitou spoke, as it
still speaks, a dialect of the north French tongue, the _langue d’oil_.
Aquitaine proper spoke the southern _langue d’oc_, and differed in a
thousand ways from the colder, fiercer, ruder, more martial lands of the
north. But the infusion of fresh blood from Poitou saved the Aquitaine
duchy from extinction. Eight dukes of Aquitaine and counts of Poitou
reigned in succession to William Tow-head, seven of whom were named
William. Under this line county after county was gradually added to the
original fief of Poitou. At last all the Limousin, Auvergne, and parts
of Berri owned them as at least nominal lords. Gascony, in the lands
beyond the Garonne, had since 872 been ruled by a hereditary line of
dukes, whose favourite name was Sancho. [Sidenote: Gascony.] On the
extinction of this family, Gascony, with its dependencies, passed in
1062 to William VIII. of Poitiers, whose grandson William X., the last
of the male stock of the house of the Guilhems, died in 1137, leaving
the nominal overlordship over the swarm of seigneurs that ruled the
district between the Loire, the Pyrenees, and the Cevennes to his
daughter Eleanor, whose vast inheritance made Louis VII. of France and
Henry II. of England in succession successful suitors for her hand.
Under the fostering care of the Williams, Aquitaine had prospered in
civilisation and the arts; and their court at Poitiers, whose
magnificent series of Romanesque basilicas still attests the splendour
of their capital, became the centre of the earliest literary efforts of
the troubadours, the poets and minstrels of the _langue d’oc_, though
the southern tongue of the court was not the Poitevins’ native speech.
[Sidenote: Toulouse.]
To the east of Aquitaine the county of Toulouse became the nucleus of a
sort of monarchical centralisation that, by the beginning of the twelfth
century, had brought the French lands beyond the Aquitanian border, the
imperial lands between the Alps and the Rhone, and the old Spanish march
between the Pyrenees and the Ebro, to look to Toulouse as the source of
its intellectual and almost of its political life. The lands dependent
on the counts of Toulouse became emphatically the Languedoc, the region
where the Romance vernacular of southern Gaul was spoken with the
greatest purity and force. While the subjects of the dukes of Aquitaine
had the purity of their Gascon contaminated by the Basque of the
Pyrenean valleys, and the northern idiom of the lands beyond the Gironde
and Dordogne, the followers of the counts of Toulouse spoke the same
tongue as the Burgundian vassals of the count of Provence, or the fierce
marchers ruled by the counts of Barcelona. The tongue of Oc has as much
claim to be regarded as a language distinct from northern French, as
northern French has to be considered separate from Italian or Spanish.
It was the first Romance tongue that boasted of a strong vernacular
literature, and those who spoke it were the first Romance people to
attain either the luxuries or corruptions of an advanced civilisation.
Its spread over southern Gaul drew a deep dividing line between northern
and southern France that has not yet been blotted out. It gave the
subjects of the southern feudalists, like the counts of Toulouse and the
dukes of Aquitaine, a solidarity that made them almost separate nations,
like the Flemings or the Bretons. Its vast expansion between the Alps
and the Ebro bade fair to overleap the boundaries set by the Treaty of
Verdun, and set up in those regions a well-defined nationality strong
and compact enough to be a makeweight against the growing concentration
of the northern French under the Capetian kings. But the civilisation of
Languedoc flowered too early to produce mature fruit. We shall see how
in the thirteenth century it succumbed to the ruder spirit of the north.
Raymond I., the first hereditary count of Toulouse, died in 864. His
successors, with whom Raymond was ever the favourite name, continued to
grow in power until they had united all Languedoc early in the twelfth
century. Their hereditary hostility to the dukes of Aquitaine, no less
than the centrifugal tendencies of southern feudalism, which they could
at best but partially counteract, prevented their authority from
attaining wider limits.
Such was the France of the tenth and eleventh centuries—divided,
chaotic, anarchic, and turbulent, yet full of vigorous life and
many-sided activity. Its growth was slower, its exploits less dazzling
than those of contemporary Germany, though perhaps it was developing on
more solid and permanent lines. Even when Germany was still the chief
political centre of the west, the fame of the French warrior had
extended over all Europe. The alliance with the Church did much, the
prevalence of the Cluniac idea did more to bring this about. The
wanderings of the Normans first spread abroad the terror of the Frankish
name. The Crusades became an essentially Frankish movement, and made the
Frankish knight the type of the feudal warrior. But the concentration of
France into a great state followed very slowly on the growth of the
reputation of the individual Frenchman.
[Illustration: FRANCE and the ARELATE IN THE ELEVENTH CENTURY SHEWING
the Great Fiefs]
GENEALOGY OF THE CAPETIAN KINGS OF FRANCE.
William of Blois.
|
Robert the Strong, Duke of the French.
|
+--------------+---------------+
| |
ODO, ROBERT,
King of the King of the
West Franks West Franks
(888–899). (922–923).
|
Hugh the Great,
Duke of the French (_d._ 956),
_m._ Hedwig, daughter of
Henry the Fowler.
|
HUGH CAPET (987–996),
_m._ Adela.
|
ROBERT II.
(The Pious--996–1031),
_m._ (1) Rosala.
(2) Bertha, daughter
of Conrad, King
of Arles, and
widow of Odo I.
of Blois.
(3) Constance of Arles.
(3) | (3)
+------------------------------+-------+
| |
HENRY I. (1031–1060), Robert,
_m._ Anne, daughter of Jaroslav, Duke of Burgundy,
Duke of Russia. Ancestor of the
| Capetian Dukes of Burgundy.
|
+--------------------------------+
| |
PHILIP I. (1060–1108), Hugh the Great,
_m._ (1) Bertha, daughter (2) Bertrada of Count of Vermandois
of Florence, Montfort, divorced |
Count of Holland. wife of |
| Fulk le Réchin, |
| Count of Anjou. |
| | |
LOUIS VI. +-----+-----+ Ralph, Count
(The Fat--1108–1137), | | of Vermandois.
_m._ Adelaide, daughter Philip. Fleury. |
of Humbert II., Isabella of Vermandois,
Count of Maurienne. _m._ Philip of Alsace,
| Count of Flanders.
|
+-+----------------+------------+----------+--------------+
| | | | |
LOUIS VII. Henry, Robert Peter Constance,
(The Young--1137–1180), Archbishop of Dreux. of _m._ (1) Eustace,
_m._ (1) Eleanor of Reims. Courtenay Count of
of Aquitaine. Boulogne.
(2) Constance (2) Raymond
of Castile. V. of
(3) Adela Toulouse.
of Champagne.
|
(1) | (2) (3)
+----+----+---------+---------+----------+---------------------+
| | | | | |
Mary, | Margaret, Alice. PHILIP II. Agnes,
_m._ Henry I. | _m._ Henry (Augustus) _m._ (1) Alexius
of Champagne. | of Anjou (1180–1223), Comnenus.
| (_d._ 1183). _m._ (1) Isabella (2) Andronicus
| of Hainault. Comnenus.
Alice, (2) Ingeborg
_m._ Theobald I. of Denmark.
of Blois. (3) Agnes of Meran.
|
+-----------------+--+------------+
| | |
(1) LOUIS VIII. (3) Philip, (3) Mary,
(1223–1226), Count of _m._ Henry I.,
_m._ Blanche of Castile, Boulogne. Duke of
granddaughter Brabant.
of Henry II.
|
+-----------------+--------+------+-------------------+
| | | |
LOUIS IX. Robert Alfonse Charles
(St. Louis) (_d._ 1250), (_d._ 1271), (_d._ 1285),
(1226–1270), Count of Count of Count of
_m._ Margaret, Artois, Poitou, Anjou and
eldest daughter _m._ Maud _m._ Joan, King of Sicily,
of Raymond of Brabant. daughter of _m._ Beatrice,
Berengar, | Raymond VII., fourth daughter
Count of | Count of of Raymond Berengar
Provence. | Toulouse. of Provence.
| |
| +-------+---------------------+
| | |
| Robert II. Blanche,
| (_d._ 1302). _m._ (1) Henry I., King of Navarre
| and Count of Champagne.
| (2) Edmund, Earl of Lancaster.
|
+---+-------+------+------+---------+----------+-------+--------+
| | | | | | | |
PHILIP III. | Peter, | Isabella, | | Agnes,
(the Bold) | Count of | _m._ Theobald V. | | _m._ Robert II.
(1270–1285), | Alençon, | (the Young), | | Duke of
_m._ (1) Isabel | _d._ 1284. | King of | | Burgundy.
daughter of | | Navarre | |
James I. | | and Count of | |
of Aragon. | | Champagne. | Margaret,
(2) Mary, | | | _m._ John I.,
daughter of | | | Duke of
Henry III., | | | Brabant.
Duke of | | |
Brabant. | | |
| | | |
| John, Robert, Blanche,
| Count of Count of _m._ Ferdinand of
| Nevers Clermont, la Cerda son of
| _d._ 1270. _d._1318 Alfonso X.
| _m._ Beatrice of of Castile.
| Burgundy
| heiress of Bourbon.
| |
| +---------------------------------+
| |
| (1) (2) |
+------------+-----------+--------------+ |
| | | | |
PHILIP IV. Charles, Louis, Margaret, Louis I.,
(the Fair) Count of Count of _m._ Edward I. Duke of Bourbon
(1285–1314), Valois. Evreux. (_d._ 1342),
_m._ Joan of | (ancestor of House
Navarre. | of Bourbon).
| |
| +-------------------------------------------------+
| |
+-+--------------+-------------+----------------+ |
| | | | |
LOUIS X. PHILIP V. CHARLES IV. Isabella, PHILIP VI.
(1314–1316). (1316–1322) (1322–1328). _m._ Edward II. of Valois,
King in 1328.