High & Late Medieval France

Hastings and the Norman empire

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.

The Bayeux Tapestry, embroidered within a generation, would tell the story in seventy metres of linen. The conquest knitted England to the continental French aristocracy for three centuries, made Norman French the language of English government, and created the paradox that would generate the Hundred Years War: a king in Paris with a vassal in London who was also a king.

Urban II preaches at Clermont

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'.

The First Crusade was overwhelmingly a French enterprise: Godfrey of Bouillon, Raymond of Toulouse, Bohemond of Taranto (Norman-French of southern Italy), Robert of Normandy, Robert of Flanders. By 1099 they had taken Jerusalem in a notorious massacre and established four Crusader states; from the Saracens' point of view, the crusaders were simply al-Faranj — the Franks. France would lead Christian arms in the Levant for two centuries.

Louis VI the Fat tames the Île-de-France

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.

His chief adviser Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis recorded the reign in a Vita Ludovici Grossi that is also a manifesto of royal sacrality. Suger's reconstruction of the abbey-church of Saint-Denis, begun in 1135 and dedicated in 1144, gave the West its first Gothic building — and a royal mausoleum to match.

Eleanor of Aquitaine weds Henry of Anjou

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.

Philip Augustus takes Château Gaillard and Normandy

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.

The crusade against the Cathars

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'.

Twenty years of war and the Treaty of Paris (1229) would bring the great County of Toulouse under Capetian suzerainty and prepare its absorption into the royal demesne. The crusade also gave the Church the inquisitorial procedure: papal inquisitors of heretical depravity, manned by the new Dominican order, would investigate the south for a generation. The Occitan civilisation of the troubadours was the cultural casualty.

Philip Augustus wins at Bouvines

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.

Louis IX and the Seventh Crusade

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.

His chronicler Jean de Joinville, his hagiographer the friar Geoffroy de Beaulieu, and his canonisation in 1297 made Saint Louis the model of Christian kingship for centuries. At home his enquêtes against royal officials, the parlement at Paris, the codification of customary law, and the gold écu — France's first stable gold coinage since antiquity — built the institutional shape of medieval French government.

The king dies at Tunis

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.

First Estates General and the Battle of Courtrai

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'.

A year later, royal officers under Guillaume de Nogaret would corner the eighty-six-year-old Boniface at Anagni and rough him up; the pope died of shock within weeks. The Church, broken, would soon move to Avignon. Philip's reign — austere, secretive, surrounded by Roman-trained lawyers — already shows the modern state in outline.

The popes move to Avignon

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.

Jacques de Molay burns on the Île aux Juifs

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.

The order's vast wealth had financed the royal house since the Crusades; its destruction allowed Philip to clear his debts. The dramatic dissolution of the Templars, the suspicious deaths of all three of Philip's sons within fourteen years, and the contemporary scandal of the Tour de Nesle (1314) — in which the king's three daughters-in-law were accused of adultery — would convince the French of a curse on the senior Capetian line.

Death of Charles IV and the Valois succession

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.

Crécy and the English longbow

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.

The plague reaches France

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.

Modern estimates put the mortality between one-third and one-half of the kingdom's population. Whole villages were left empty and would never be reoccupied; rural cults of the protective saints — Roch, Sebastian — were everywhere reinforced. The shock collapsed seignorial revenues, sent wages up, and prepared the social tinder for the Jacquerie of 1358 and the Maillotin and Cabochien revolts of Paris.

Poitiers and the capture of John II

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.

The Treaty of Brétigny (1360) gave Edward sovereign possession of an enlarged Aquitaine and a ransom of three million écus for the king. Étienne Marcel's Paris revolt collapsed in 1358, the same year as the Jacquerie peasant rising in the Beauvaisis, brutally repressed by Charles of Navarre. The reign of Charles V (1364-1380) and his constable Bertrand du Guesclin would patiently reverse much of the loss before the war exploded again.

Agincourt

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.

Henry V of England, heir of France

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.

Joan of Arc lifts the siege of Orléans

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.

Captured at Compiègne by the Burgundians in 1430, sold to the English, tried at Rouen by a court of pro-English French clergy under bishop Pierre Cauchon, Joan was burned in the market-place of Rouen on 30 May 1431, aged nineteen. A second trial of 1456 quashed the verdict; the Catholic Church canonised her in 1920. She would be remembered as the saint who saved France, made by enemies and friends alike into the symbol of national resistance.

Castillon and the recovery of Aquitaine

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.

The reforms of Charles VII (1422-1461) made the recovery possible: the standing companies d'ordonnance, the regular taille and franc-archers, the codification of customary law, and the firm alliance with Jacques Cœur's mercantile capital. By his death France had a professional army, a regular income, and the institutional shape it would carry to Versailles.

Charles the Bold dies at Nancy

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.

Louis XI — the 'Universal Spider' of Commynes' Mémoires — picked up Burgundy, Picardy, Anjou (1481), Maine, and Provence (1481, with the inheritance of King René), and ate the last great fiefs into the royal demesne. The Habsburg-French rivalry over the Burgundian inheritance in the Netherlands and Franche-Comté would dominate Europe for two centuries.

Charles VIII marches into Italy

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.

Niccolò Machiavelli, watching the French king ride through Florence, would later write that Italy had been 'overrun by Charles, plundered by Louis, taken by Ferdinand, and shamed by the Swiss'. The expedition was a military success and a political failure, but it brought back to France Italian humanists, architects, painters, gardeners, and cooks; the medieval kingdom returned home a Renaissance monarchy in waiting.