He is neither a man nor a beast, but a statue.
Bernard Saisset, Bishop of Pamiers, on Philip IV
FOR ABOUT A year, Philip Augustus’s son Louis VIII claimed the title of King of England. He landed on the Isle of Thanet in Kent on 21 May 1216, was welcomed by the barons, marched to London and was proclaimed king in St Paul’s Cathedral. Three weeks later he had taken Winchester and soon controlled more than half the kingdom. He would doubtless have gone a good deal further – and perhaps even been crowned – had not John died of dysentery on 18 October, leaving a nine-year-old son, Henry. Thinking, presumably, that the son could not possibly be as bad as the father, many of the barons transferred their allegiance to the infant Henry III, and it was agreed to crown him immediately to reinforce his claim to the throne. The coronation ceremony, using his mother’s necklace – John having lost the crown jewels,* which had travelled with him on campaign – was held in Gloucester Cathedral on the 28th, and for Louis the tide suddenly turned. His army was beaten at Lincoln the following May, his navy off Sandwich in August, and he was forced to come to terms. He got off lightly. The Treaty of Lambeth awarded him 10,000 marks, in return for a promise never to attack England again and an admission that he had never been its legitimate king.
His claim to the English throne had been slight indeed, but there is reason to suppose that had he lived he might have been an excellent King of France. Alas, the dread dysentery was once again to do its work, and he died in November 1226, leaving a son of twelve – another Louis – with his widow, Blanche of Castile, to act as regent. Blanche – she was the granddaughter of Henry II by his daughter Eleanor, and hence the niece of Richard Coeur-de-Lion and John – was passionately devoted to her eldest son, and insanely jealous when he married Margaret of Provence. After their marriage, he and Margaret were given apartments one above the other, and it was said that both bedrooms were so closely watched that the couple, who were deeply in love, had to meet on the staircase between them to avoid the prying eyes of Blanche. They managed none the less to have eleven children.
It was Blanche, too, who was almost certainly responsible for Louis IX’s excessive piety. Every morning he heard Mass, every afternoon the office of the dead. At regular intervals he washed the feet of the poor. He also took part in two further Crusades. The first of these – it was actually the Seventh, and it deprived France of her ruler for six years – was like almost all the Crusades after the First, a succession of disasters. The royal fleet, commanded by the king’s brothers Charles of Anjou and Robert of Artois, sailed from Aigues-Mortes during the autumn of 1248 for Egypt, to which the base of Muslim power had now shifted. Louis’s attempted march from Damietta to Cairo in the high summer of 1249 was made almost impossible by the appalling heat and the annual flooding of the Nile, which seems to have taken him completely by surprise; then in April 1250, at the three-day Battle of Al-Mansura, he lost his entire army of some 20,000 men. He himself was captured and, after swearing an oath never to return to Egypt, was finally ransomed for 400,000 dinars. Now would surely have been a sensible time for him to return to France; instead, he spent four more years in what was left of Outremer – limited now to Acre, Jaffa and Caesarea – helping the remaining Crusaders to rebuild their defences and holding fruitless negotiations with the Muslim authorities in Syria. Not till the spring of 1254 did he take ship for home.
Once returned to France, Louis cannot have been altogether surprised to find a new coalition of the barons – including, inevitably, the King of England – arrayed against him. He dealt with it in the most unusual fashion; to the surprise of everyone and to the horror of many, he cheerfully granted Poitou, Guienne and Gascony to the English king – for, he explained, ‘we have two sisters to wife* and our children are first cousins, wherefore it is surely fitting that peace be between us’. He asked in return only that Henry do him homage for these lands, and that he should abandon all other continental claims. The gesture was in fact typical of him: peace among Christians was his first priority, and he was prepared to go to almost any lengths to secure it. Never had a united Christendom come closer to realisation.
Within France itself, Louis continued where his father had stopped, doing his best to put an end to the innumerable little wars between the barons that were plaguing the country. He also radically revised the judicial system, banning trial by ordeal and, even more important, introducing the principle of presumption of innocence. (He himself would dispense justice, we are told, sitting under an old oak tree in the Forest of Vincennes.) Characteristically, he was an ardent collector of relics of Christ’s Passion; and to house the holiest item in his entire collection, the Crown of Thorns – which had been given to him by Baldwin II, the Latin Emperor of Constantinople† – he built the loveliest early Gothic building in all France, the Sainte-Chapelle.‡
But not even the Sainte-Chapelle was enough to satisfy Louis’s Christian zeal. There was more crusading to be done. The Eighth Crusade was his own idea. The catastrophic Seventh and his consequent imprisonment had continued to rankle, and twenty years later in 1267, when he was already in his fifty-fourth year, he decided to make one more attempt to restore Christian rule to the Holy Land. This time, on the advice of his brother Charles of Anjou, he decided that the new Crusade should begin with an attack on Tunis. He took three years to prepare a suitable fleet for the operation, but one wonders whether he had learnt anything from his previous experience in the tropics. It seems on the whole not, because the fleet chose to land on the African coast in July 1270. There was little water available and nearly all of it was filthy. Within days most of his men had fallen sick, and a month later the king himself was dead. Charles of Anjou took over the leadership, but without Louis the heart had gone out of the expedition and the survivors soon returned home.
Saint Louis – he was canonised in 1297, barely a quarter-century after his death – left a France very different from the one he had inherited. Henceforth the head of the Capetian line would be accepted everywhere as the legitimate sovereign chosen by God – a quite unprecedented move towards absolute monarchy – while his kingdom acquired a moral authority unlike anything it had known before. This made him, it need hardly be said, a difficult act to follow. His son Philip III was known as Philip the Bold (in French, le Hardi), but for no very good reason. He had accompanied his father on the Eighth Crusade, but had not particularly distinguished himself; and on his return to Paris after his father’s death he had proved timid, submissive and strangely colourless – crushed, probably, by the domineering personalities of both his parents, and especially his mother. It was typical of the formidable Queen Margaret, during her husband’s lifetime, to make her son swear to remain under her tutelage until he was thirty; and although the Pope technically released him from this oath when he was only eighteen he was never to escape from her shadow. He died at Perpignon in 1285 and was soon forgotten.
After Philip Augustus and Saint Louis, the third and last member of the great Capetian trinity was King Philip IV, the Fair; and King Philip was always a bit of a puzzle. He gave nothing away and no one could be quite sure what made him tick. The popular image of the handsome young king, swaggering and debonair, could hardly be more misleading. He was, as far as we can make out, only moderately good-looking; the eldest son of Philip the Bold and Isabella of Aragon, he was taciturn and surly, passionately acquisitive, and capable on occasion of appalling cruelty. And yet he was, unquestionably, a great king. A serious-minded and hard-working professional, he governed not with barons but with lawyers and bureaucrats, his object not by any means that of his grandfather – to raise France to be a virtuous, peaceful and above all a Christian monarchy – but rather to make it strong, efficient and influential. Thanks to his marriage (to Queen Joan I of Navarre) and to other inheritances, his dominions steadily increased, and with them his expenditure. Throughout his reign he was desperate for money, and he did not much care how he got it. This attitude was to make him many enemies, among whom none was more implacable than Pope Boniface VIII.
Boniface was the epitome of the worldly cleric. Born between 1220 and 1230, a man of huge intelligence and a first-class legist and scholar, he founded Rome University, codified the canon law and re-established the Vatican Library and Archive. But there was little of the spiritual in his nature. For him the great sanctions of the Church existed only to further his own temporal ends and to enrich his family. Foreign rulers he treated less as his subjects than as his menials. As for his office, he saw it in exclusively political terms, determined as he was to reassert the supremacy of the Apostolic See over the emerging nations of Europe. For this task he possessed abundant energy, self-confidence and strength of will; what he lacked was the slightest sense of diplomacy or finesse. Concepts such as conciliation or compromise simply did not interest him; he charged forward regardless – and ultimately he paid the price.
The mutual hostility that existed between himself and King Philip had begun in 1296, when Philip imposed a heavy tax on French churchmen. Furious, the Pope had replied with a bull, formally prohibiting the taxation of clergy or church property without express authorisation from Rome. Had he given the matter any serious consideration, he would have seen in an instant just how short-sighted this action was: Philip simply forbade the export of currency and valuables, simultaneously barring the entry of Roman tax collectors into the country. Since the papal exchequer relied heavily on income from France, Boniface had no alternative but to climb down – attempting to recover some of his lost prestige by formally canonising Philip’s grandfather Louis IX.
Then, in the autumn of 1301, Philip summarily imprisoned the obscure but contumacious Bishop of Pamiers, charging him with treason and insulting behaviour.* The Pope, without having troubled even to look into the case, angrily demanded the bishop’s release; Philip refused; and the battle entered its final phase. Boniface, in yet another bull – ausculta fili (‘listen, son’) – loftily summoned the king himself, together with his senior clergy, to a synod in Rome to be held in November 1302. Philip of course refused; but thirty-nine French bishops somewhat surprisingly found the courage to attend. It was after this that Boniface fired his last broadside, unam sanctam, in which he claimed in so many words that ‘it is altogether necessary for salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff’. There was nothing particularly new in this; similar claims had been made by Innocent III and several other popes. None the less, papal absolutism could scarcely go further, and there was no question that it was King Philip whom Boniface had principally in mind.
Probably on the advice of his new minister, Guillaume de Nogaret – whose Albigensian† grandfather had been burnt at the stake, and who consequently had no love for the papacy – Philip now returned to his former tactic of all-out personal attack. All the old charges – together with several new ones, such as illegitimacy and heresy – were repeated, and an insistent demand made for a general council at which the Supreme Pontiff should be made to answer for his crimes. An army of 1,600 under de Nogaret was despatched to Italy with orders to seize the Pope and bring him, by force if necessary, to France. Boniface was meanwhile in his palace at Anagni, putting the finishing touches to a bull excommunicating Philip and releasing his subjects from their allegiance. He was due to publish it on 8 September; but on the previous afternoon de Nogaret and his troops arrived. The Pope – by this time he cannot have been far short of eighty – donned his full papal regalia and faced them with courage, challenging them to kill him. They briefly took him prisoner, but he was rescued by the people of Anagni and spirited away. De Nogaret, seeing that there was no way of laying hands on him short of a massacre, wisely decided to retire.
His mission, however, had not been in vain. The old Pope’s pride had suffered a mortal blow. After a few days’ rest he was escorted back to Rome, but he never recovered from the shock. He died less than a month later, on 12 October 1303. Dante, by anticipation – since the Pope’s death occurred just three years after the poet’s visit to hell – places him in the eighth circle, upside down in a furnace. The judgement may be thought a trifle harsh; but one sees, perhaps, what he meant.
Boniface’s successor, Benedict XI, lived for only a year after his election and can safely be ignored. The subsequent conclave that opened in 1304 was split down the middle, and the deadlock continued for eleven months; it was finally agreed that if a new pope were ever to be elected he would have to come from outside the College of Cardinals. The choice finally fell on Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux, who took the name of Clement V. Had he been an Italian, elected and crowned in Rome, he might well have proved himself, if not a great pope, at least a strong one. Being, however, a subject of King Philip, from the moment of his election he found himself under almost intolerable pressure from his sovereign. Philip began as he meant to go on, insisting first of all that, since the new Pope was already in France, he should be crowned there.
There is no reason to believe that Clement did not intend to move to Rome in due course. For the following four years he had no fixed abode and moved constantly between Lyon, Poitiers and Bordeaux, his cardinals following as best they could. (By now they were mostly Frenchmen: of the ten he created in December 1305, nine were French – four of them his nephews – and the French element was to be increased still further in 1310 and again in 1312.) Philip meanwhile maintained the pressure to keep him in France; but in 1309 Clement decided to settle in Avignon – which, lying as it did on the east bank of the Rhône, was at that time the property of Philip’s cousin and vassal Charles II of Anjou. The little town – it was with some five thousand inhabitants scarcely more than a village – was to be the home of six more popes after him, and the seat of the papacy for the next sixty-eight years.
Those years are often referred to as the ‘Babylonian captivity’; but the popes’ residence in Avignon was nothing of the kind; they were there only because they wanted to be. None the less, early fourteenth-century Avignon was not a comfortable place. The poet Petrarch described it as ‘a disgusting city’, battered by the mistral, ‘a sewer where all the filth of the universe is collected’. The Aragonese ambassador was so nauseated by the stench of the streets that he had to return home. As papal territory, it was also a place of refuge for criminals of every description, and its taverns and brothels were notorious. Nor was it designed to accommodate a papal court. The Pope and his immediate entourage moved into the local Dominican priory; a few fortunate cardinals managed to requisition the larger houses; the rest found a roof wherever they could.*
The move to Avignon should at least have allowed Pope Clement a degree of independence; but Philip was too strong for him. The Pope was a sick man – he is said to have suffered from stomach cancer throughout his pontificate – and he soon showed himself to be little more than a puppet of the French king. Determined as he was to bring Boniface to justice, in 1309 Philip obliged him to open a full enquiry into the late Pope’s record. Delays and various complications ensued, and in April 1311 the proceedings were suspended. Clement, however, had to pay a heavy price: the annulment of all Boniface’s actions that were prejudicial to French interests and the absolution of his attacker Guillaume de Nogaret. And a still greater humiliation was in store: Philip now involved him in what was to be the most shameful crime of his life: the elimination of the Knights Templar.
It is difficult for us nowadays to understand – even to believe – the influence of the Templars in the later Middle Ages. Founded in the early twelfth century to protect the pilgrims flocking to the Holy Places after the First Crusade, within fifty years they were firmly established in almost every kingdom of Christendom, from Denmark to Spain, from Ireland to Armenia; within a century ‘the poor fellow-soldiers of Jesus Christ’ were – despite their Benedictine vows of poverty, chastity and obedience – financing half Europe, the most powerful international bankers of the civilised world. By 1250 they were thought to possess some nine thousand landed properties; in Paris and London their houses were used as strongholds for royal treasure. From the English Templars Henry III borrowed the purchase money for the island of Oléron in 1235; from the French, Philip the Fair extracted the dowry of his daughter Isabella on her marriage to Edward II of England. For Louis IX they provided the greater part of his ransom, while to Edward I they advanced no less than 25,000 livres. They were most powerful of all in France, where they effectively constituted a state within a state; and as their influence increased it was hardly surprising that Philip should have become uneasy. But that was not the reason for the action which he now took against them.
He wanted their money. He had already dealt with the Jews; in 1306 he had seized all their assets and expelled them from France.* Now it was the turn of the Templars. Similar action against them would secure all the Templar wealth and property in his kingdom, and should solve his financial problems for years to come. The Order would, he knew, prove a formidable adversary; fortunately he had a weapon ready to hand. For many years there had been rumours circulating about the secret rites practised at its midnight meetings. All he needed to do was institute an official enquiry; it would not be hard to find witnesses who – in return for a small consideration – would be prepared to give the evidence required. And that evidence, when extracted, was all he could have dared to hope. The Templars, he now claimed, were Satanists who at their initiation denied Jesus Christ and trampled on the crucifix. Sodomy was not only permitted but actively encouraged. Such illegitimate children as were nevertheless engendered were disposed of by being roasted alive.
On Friday 13 October 1307, the Grand Master of the Temple, Jacques de Molay, was arrested in Paris with sixty of his leading brethren. To force them to confess, they were first tortured by the palace authorities and then handed over to the official inquisitors to be tortured again. Over the next six weeks no fewer than 138 knights were subjected to examination, of whom – hardly surprisingly – 123, including the Grand Master himself, finally confessed to at least some of the charges levelled against them. Philip, meanwhile, wrote to his fellow-monarchs urging them to follow his example. Edward II of England – who probably felt on somewhat shaky ground himself – was initially inclined to argue with his father-in-law, but when firm instructions arrived from Pope Clement V – as always, only too happy to assist the French king in any way he could – he hesitated no longer. The English Grand Master was taken into custody on 9 January 1308. All his knights followed him soon afterwards.
The public trial of the Order opened in Paris on 11 April 1310, when it was announced that any of the accused who attempted to retract an earlier confession would be burned at the stake. On 12 May fifty-four knights suffered this fate, and in the next two weeks nine others followed them. The whole contemptible affair dragged on for another four years, during which Pope and King continued to confer – a sure sign of the doubts that refused to go away – and to discuss the disposition of the Order’s enormous wealth. Meanwhile the Grand Master languished in prison until his fate could be decided. Not until 14 March 1314 did the authorities bring him out on to the scaffold that had been erected in front of Notre-Dame, there to repeat his confession for the last time.
They had reason to regret their decision. De Molay can hardly be said to have distinguished himself over the previous seven years. He had confessed, retracted and confessed again; he had shown little courage, and few qualities even of leadership. But now he was an old man, in his middle seventies and about to meet his God: he had nothing more to lose. And so, supported by his colleague Geoffroy de Charnay, he spoke out loud and clear: as the Lord was his witness he and his Order were totally innocent of all the charges of which they had been accused. At once he and de Charnay were hurried away by the royal marshals, while messengers hastened to Philip. The king delayed his decision no longer. That same evening the two old knights were rowed out to a small island in the Seine, where the fires had been prepared.
It was later rumoured that with his last words de Molay had predicted that both Pope Clement and King Philip would appear at the judgement seat of God before the year was out, and had further pronounced that the royal line should be accursed to the thirteenth generation; it did not pass unnoticed that the Pope was dead in little more than a month, and the king, who was only forty-six, suffered a fatal stroke while hunting towards the end of November.* The two old knights faced the flames with courage and died nobly. After night had fallen, the monks of the Augustinian monastery on the further shore came to collect their bones, to be revered as those of saints and martyrs.
A great pope – Gregory VII for example, or Innocent III – could and would have saved the Templars; Clement V, alas, fell a long way short of greatness. His craven subservience to Philip in the most shameful chapter of the king’s reign constitutes an indelible stain on his memory. In one instance only did he show any inclination to go his own way: Philip – who had instituted the campaign solely to get his hands on the Templars’ money – cannot have welcomed the bull by which, on 2 May 1312, the Pope decreed that all their properties (outside the kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, Portugal and Majorca, on which he deferred his decision) should devolve upon their brethren the Knights Hospitallers, who suddenly found themselves richer than they had ever dreamed.
Anglo-French relations, meanwhile, continued to be an open sore. In England, Edward I had succeeded his father Henry III in 1272. At six foot two he towered over those around him, though a drooping left eyelid and a lisp slightly spoiled the general effect. Fortunately for King Philip much of his campaigning life was taken up, first with the Ninth Crusade and later with baronial wars in England, Wales and Scotland; but in 1293 matters came to a head when a number of French sailors were violently attacked while ashore in British-held Gascony. Philip somewhat high-handedly summoned Edward, in his capacity as Duke of Aquitaine, to appear before the Parlement* of Paris to answer the charges.
Edward of course had no intention of doing any such thing. First he sent ambassadors to Paris, who were instantly expelled. He then despatched his brother, Edmund Crouchback, Earl of Lancaster – who was both Philip’s cousin and stepfather-in-law – to speak on his behalf, not only about the troubles in Gascony but about the king’s own remarriage. He was still heartbroken after the death in 1290 of his beloved wife Eleanor of Castile (one of the happiest marriages in English history) but he had reluctantly agreed – entirely for diplomatic reasons – to marry Philip’s half-sister Blanche. In the event of the negotiations being successful, Lancaster was also bidden to bring her to England. Unfortunately they were not: Philip was to reveal somewhat to his embarrassment that Blanche was in fact already engaged to Rudolph III of Habsburg. Furious, Edward once again declared war; and it was only five years later that a distinctly shaky truce was agreed. Finally, in 1299, a series of treaties provided for a double marriage: first, Edward to Blanche’s sister Margaret; second, Edward’s son, the future Edward II, to Philip’s daughter Isabella. The first of these two marriages certainly helped to keep the peace between the two countries, though it cannot have been much fun for poor Margaret, forty years younger than her husband; the second was a disaster, since it led, as we shall shortly see, to the Hundred Years’ War.
Philip the Fair died in 1314; but the last year of his life was overshadowed by the worst scandal the House of Capet was ever called upon to face – when his daughter Isabella, Queen of England, publicly accused his three daughters-in-law of adultery, most of which she claimed had taken place in the dark and mysterious Tour de Nesle, a guard-tower of the old city wall on the left bank of the Seine. The king had three sons, all three of whom were to be kings of France. The eldest, the future Louis X, had married Margaret, daughter of Robert II, Duke of Burgundy. Their marriage was not happy; Louis is said to have neglected his wife, ‘feisty and shapely’ as she was, far preferring to play tennis with his friends. The second son, Philip, was married to Joan, eldest daughter of Count Otto IV of Burgundy. This alliance seems to have been a lot more successful: the pair had four children in quick succession, and Philip’s passionate love letters have come down to us. Charles, the third son, from all we hear sounds a crashing bore, and his marriage to Joan’s sister Blanche was boring too.
The story begins in 1313, when Edward II and Queen Isabella came on a visit to her father in Paris. Their marriage was certainly not going well. Edward was flagrantly homosexual, and spent far more time with his favourite, Piers Gaveston, than he did with his wife. While in Paris, however, the two were on their best behaviour, and Isabella presented embroidered purses to her brothers- and sisters-in-law. A few months later, back in London, when the royal couple gave a dinner to celebrate their return Isabella noticed that two of the purses she had presented to her sisters-in-law were being carried by two young knights, the brothers Gautier and Philippe* d’Aunay. She immediately drew her own conclusions, and informed her father.
The king put the two men under surveillance, and gradually the facts became clear. It appeared that Gautier and Philippe were enjoying regular encounters in the Tour de Nesle with Margaret and Blanche. The third of the three ladies, Joan, was believed to have preferred watching. At any rate Philip decided to make the matter public and had all five arrested. The d’Aunay brothers were interrogated under torture; both confessed and were found guilty. They were first castrated, then drawn and quartered, and finally hanged. Blanche and Margaret, tried before the Parlement in Paris, were also convicted. Their heads were shaven and both were sentenced to imprisonment for life. They were sent to the dungeons of the castle of Château-Gaillard, where Margaret was smothered as soon as her husband succeeded to the throne so that he could marry again. Blanche remained in the dungeons for eight years, and was then sent to a nunnery. Joan was also tried, but found innocent.
Were the findings against the three princesses and their lovers justified? Probably yes – though Isabella had recently given birth to her son Edward, and there is no doubt that the removal of all three of her sisters-in-law would have substantially increased his prospects for the throne of France. Her own marriage was to fail catastrophically in a few years, and it is widely believed that she may have been indirectly responsible for the hideous murder of her husband Edward II, after she and her lover Roger Mortimer had seized power in England in 1326. She was not known as the ‘She-Wolf of France’ for nothing.
* Tradition says that they were lost while the royal baggage train was negotiating the treacherous tidal mudflats around the Wash.
* Henry III was married to Queen Margaret’s sister Eleanor.
† The Greek emperors had been replaced by Franks after the Fourth Crusade (1204–5). They were to recapture Constantinople in 1261.
‡ The Crown of Thorns, however, is now kept at Notre-Dame.
* He had a point. The bishop had called him ‘a useless owl’.
* The present papal palace was not built until the reign of Benedict XII, the third of the Avignon popes.
* Edward I of England had already done much the same in 1290.
* The second part of the curse also seems to have had some effect. Philip and his five predecessors had reigned for a total of 177 years; his three sons, succeeding each other, reigned less than six years each, dying aged respectively twenty-seven, twenty-eight and thirty-three, with none of them leaving a male successor despite a total of six wives between them.
* The French Parlement should never be confused with the English Parliament. It was more like a permanent court of justice.
* I use the French version of his name here to avoid confusion. Maurice Druon’s Les rois maudits provides a splendid version of the story. There is also a play by Alexandre Dumas, La Tour de Nesle, which I have not seen, and a highly enjoyable film made by Abel Gance in 1954 which I have.