From the early Capetians and the Norman conquest of England through the crusades, Bouvines and the Albigensian war, the age of Saint Louis and Philip the Fair, the Avignon papacy, the Hundred Years War, the Black Death and Joan of Arc, to Louis XI's consolidation and the eve of the Italian Wars. Slide across the centuries to read the major events that made medieval France.
Hugh Capet dies and is succeeded by his son Robert the Pious. From Aquitaine the bishops are already proclaiming the Pax Dei — sworn assemblies of arms-bearers pledging not to attack the unarmed, the church, the merchant, and the peasant.
From the early Capetians and the Norman conquest of England through the crusades, Bouvines and the Albigensian war, the age of Saint Louis and Philip the Fair, the Avignon papacy, the Hundred Years War, the Black Death and Joan of Arc, to Louis XI's consolidation and the eve of the Italian Wars. Slide across the centuries to read the major events that made medieval France.
Hugh Capet dies and is succeeded by his son Robert the Pious. From Aquitaine the bishops are already proclaiming the Pax Dei — sworn assemblies of arms-bearers pledging not to attack the unarmed, the church, the merchant, and the peasant.
Duke William II of Normandy crosses the Channel, kills King Harold at Hastings, and is crowned king of England at Westminster on Christmas Day. A vassal of the king of France now wears a royal crown of his own.
At a great council at Clermont in Auvergne, Pope Urban II — himself a Frenchman from Châtillon-sur-Marne — summons the warriors of the Latin West to recover Jerusalem from the Seljuks. The crowd shouts back Deus vult, 'God wills it'.
Louis VI inherits the throne and spends a generation in the saddle, breaking the petty castellans of the royal demesne — Hugues du Puiset, Thomas de Marle — and making the king's peace mean something between the Seine and the Loire.
Eight weeks after the annulment of her marriage to Louis VII, Eleanor — duchess of Aquitaine and Poitiers — marries the young Henry Plantagenet. Two years later he becomes Henry II of England. From Hadrian's Wall to the Pyrenees, half of France now belongs to a single foreign king.
After a six-month siege Philip II Augustus takes Richard the Lionheart's great fortress on the Seine and overruns Normandy from the weak John Lackland. By 1206 Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and Poitou are also in the royal hand. The Angevin empire is broken on its French side.
Innocent III proclaims a crusade against the Cathar heretics of Languedoc. Simon de Montfort leads northern French knights south; Béziers is stormed in July with the cry attributed to the legate Arnaud Amalric — 'kill them all, God will know his own'.
On a July Sunday near Lille, Philip II crushes the coalition of John of England, the emperor Otto IV, and the count of Flanders. The defeat of Otto loses him the empire; the defeat of John makes Magna Carta inevitable in England. France is left the great power of the West.
King Louis IX sails from his new port of Aigues-Mortes for Egypt. Two years later he is captured at Mansurah and ransomed for an immense sum. He spends four years in the Holy Land and brings back, in another moment, the Crown of Thorns — for which the Sainte-Chapelle is built in Paris.
On a second crusade, this time diverted to Tunis, Louis IX dies of dysentery on the Carthaginian dunes in August. His son Philip III brings home his bones in a long mournful procession through Italy and the Alps; the route would be marked by stone crosses called montjoies.
Locked in struggle with Pope Boniface VIII over taxation of the clergy, Philip IV summons clergy, nobles, and townsmen to Notre-Dame — the first Estates General. The same year his army of knights is annihilated by the urban militias of Flanders at Courtrai, the 'Battle of the Golden Spurs'.
Pope Clement V, a Gascon elected under French pressure, settles his curia at Avignon on the Rhône. For seventy years, until 1377, the seven popes who reign there will all be Frenchmen, and the papacy will be a virtual annex of the Valois court.
After seven years of torture and confessions, Jacques de Molay, the last grand master of the Templars, is burned alive on a small Seine island opposite the royal palace. He is said to curse Philip and Clement to meet him before God's tribunal within the year. Both die within months.
Charles IV, third son of Philip the Fair to reign and die without a male heir, leaves the throne open. The peers of France pass over the strongest claimant — Edward III of England, grandson of Philip through his mother Isabella — and crown Philip of Valois, the late king's first cousin. Salic law has been invented.
Edward III's army, perhaps ten thousand strong, destroys the French chivalry on a slope near Crécy-en-Ponthieu. The longbowmen of Wales and Cheshire shoot down wave after wave of knights, including the blind king John of Bohemia. Calais falls within the year.
From Marseille, where it arrived from Genoese ships off Caffa, the plague reaches Avignon in January, Paris by August. The papal physician Guy de Chauliac watches it carry off cardinals; the chronicler Jean Froissart says a third of the world dies.
The Black Prince Edward, son of Edward III, defeats and captures John II of France at Maupertuis near Poitiers. The king is carried to London. In his absence, the dauphin Charles, the Estates General, and the Parisian provost Étienne Marcel struggle for control of the kingdom.
Henry V of England, with an exhausted and outnumbered army, slaughters the chivalry of France in a muddy ploughed field in the Pas-de-Calais. Constable Charles d'Albret falls; thousands of French nobles die or are captured. Within five years Henry will be heir to the French crown.
Allied with the Burgundians after the murder of Duke John the Fearless at Montereau, the mad Charles VI signs the Treaty of Troyes: his daughter Catherine marries Henry V, who is made regent of France and heir to the throne. The dauphin Charles is disinherited.
A seventeen-year-old shepherdess from Domrémy in Lorraine, claiming visions of saints Michael, Catherine, and Margaret, persuades the dauphin Charles to give her armour and an army. In ten days she breaks the English siege of Orléans. Two months later Charles is crowned king at Reims.
On the banks of the Dordogne, French royal artillery under the brothers Bureau destroys the last English army under John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury. Bordeaux falls in October. The English keep only Calais. The same year, Constantinople falls to the Turks.
Charles the Bold, last Valois duke of Burgundy, is killed before Nancy by the Swiss pikemen of René II of Lorraine — his face half eaten by wolves when found in the snow. Louis XI of France seizes the duchy of Burgundy. Mary, Charles's daughter, marries Maximilian of Habsburg, taking the Low Countries with her.
Pressing a claim to Naples through the old Angevin inheritance, the young Charles VIII crosses the Alps with forty thousand men and the new royal artillery. The Italian states fall before him in months. The Italian Wars — and the encounter of France with the Renaissance — have begun.