Some medieval French kings - by Jonn Elledge
First, a shameless sales pitch. I've been talking about my new book, A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps, quite a lot recently. One side effect of this is I've not been pushing this newsletter quite as hard as I normally would, and if you stop pedalling you stop growing and oh god.
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English royal history, whatever else it is, is a fantastic stock of archetypes. Richard the Lionheart was brave and good; his brother John, cowardly and bad. Henry VIII was the guy with all the wives; Charles II the party king; and so on. These received ideas about what particular monarchs were like are often contested, if not wildly inaccurate. But nonetheless these sixty or so men and occasionally women, give form to eras, adjectives and ideas as reliably as characters from Dickens or the MCU.
Not having been force-fed the foreign equivalents of Little Arthur’s History of England at an early age, I am less familiar with the occupants of other thrones, and less able to instinctively grasp what they “mean”. (The French also, one suspects, have a rather different attitude to their royal history, even though they executed precisely the same number of kings as the English.) But occasional forays into the history of pre-revolutionary France nonetheless feel like a trip to a parallel universe: the archetypes are familiar, but the names and dates are different. Here are a few of the more amusing or noteworthy kings I have found there.
Clovis I (509-11). Often listed as the first king of France, even though that sentiment contains about as many questionable statements as it does words. For one thing, in the early 6th century, France didn’t actually exist: Clovis was instead king of the Franks, a bunch of Germanic tribes who’d been pootling around the western Roman empire for centuries when it dissolved after 476. And while his territory did include bits of northeastern France it also held chunks of the Low Countries and western Germany. He probably didn’t think of himself as the first king of the Franks either, so much as the most successful king of the Salian Franks, the tribe he’d led to domination over the others. Even his name is an issue: “Clovis” is just an archaic form of Louis, and the fact the four Merovingian kings of that name take the old version while all later ones take the new is probably convention as much as insight into what they were actually called.
Anyway. Clovis was the first king to rule the unified version of an early medieval polity from which France, among other things, would one day evolve, and his heirs would rule for a couple of centuries as the Merovingians. Given that it’d take another four centuries for the lowland bit of Britannia to knock its “warring petty kingdoms which get repeatedly invaded” phase on the head, this isn’t bad going.
Some historians today prefer to cite the first king of France as...
Charles II, “the Bald” (843-877). Aha, you thought I was going to say Charlemagne didn’t you? Nope: this is his grandson.
Pepin the Short (751-768) seized the throne by forcing the last Merovingian, Childeric III (734-751), into a monastery with the blessing of the Pope: by doing so, he made official the fact his family had effectively been ruling for years as Mayors of the Palace – basically chiefs of staff to the weaker, later Merovingians – and founded the Carolignian dynasty. Pepin’s son Charles – known to us as Charlemagne (768-814) – did some warring to extend the bounds of his kingdom into northern Spain, northern Italy and further into Germany. Then he marched into Rome, where he pretended to be surprised when he was crowned emperor of Rome by a different Pope, who’d decided that, because the extant imperial throne in Constantinople was currently held by a woman named Irene, it was effectively vacant. (The papacy, even then, was not known for its feminism.)
So yes, to be fair, these guys are big deals. But what they ruled wasn’t France in any meaningful sense.
France was a product of the fact Charlemagne’s empire didn’t long outlast him. His own plans to divide it among his sons never came off because only one of them, Louis I “the Pious” (814-840), survived him; but when he died, too, the empire was split into three by the Treaty of Verdun (843). East Francia, which went to the second son Louis II, would become the Holy Roman Empire and eventually Germany; Middle Francia, which contained both imperial capitals at Aachen and Rome, would go to the eldest son, Lothair, and would end up being repeatedly divided, invaded and generally trampled over by its more coherent neighbours for the next 11 centuries. (More on all this in my book!) Lastly there was West Francia, which would gradually morph into France, and which ended up as the domain of the littlest brother, Charles the Bald. We got there eventually.
Charles was not, incidentally, bald: contemporary paintings show him with an impressive head of hair. The name may have been ironic; or it may have been an obscure joke about how little land he had in his youth compared to his brothers.
Most early French kings tended to have nicknames, just like early English ones, because nobody had yet got around to inventing regnal numbering. Other notable examples include Louis II “the Stammerer” (877-879), Charles III “the Fat” (884-887), a different Charles III known as “the Simple” (898-922), Louis IV “from Overseas” (936-954), Louis V “the Do-Nothing” (968-987) and so on.
Hugh Capet (987-996). Hugh’s grandfather had briefly ruled as Robert I (922-923) before becoming the only French king to die in battle. (Bloody cowards.) His son and Hugh’s father, Hugh the Great, was the guy who brought Louis IV back from his exile at the English court to become king; in exchange, he was named Duke of the Franks and “second after us in all our kingdoms” – a sort of “Hand of the King” figure – then married a Saxon heiress.
So our Hugh had a pretty good pedigree for ruling a large chunk of medieval Europe, and when Louis Do-Nothing conveniently died in a riding accident without an heir, he got himself elected king. This turned out to be a good gig, because – with brief interruptions for revolution and Napoleon – his descendants would be ruling France as the Capetians for the next 861 years.
Louis VIII (1223-1226). Introduced rules undermining debts owed to Jews, and launched a crusade against the Cathars, a group the Popes – oh, those guys! – had randomly decided were heretics. Interesting for my purposes mainly because he’s the only French king ever to be declared king of England, in 1216, a year when the English nobility were so pissed off with King John that they were willing to pass the crown to any foreign prince who showed up in London with an army. Louis was eventually defeated in battle, and paid to go away again.
Charles VI (1380-1422). Known initially as “the beloved”, after a period of good and popular rule thanks to his ejecting the bickering uncles who had acted as regents during his minority, and instead turning to a group of his father’s advisors known by the unlikely name of “the marmousets”. Known later as “the mad” after psychosis led him to become convinced his body was made of glass, and to take defensive measures involving having iron bars sewn into his clothes so people couldn’t touch and shatter him. At other points he believed himself to be St George, or simply forgot that he was king. All this may have given Henry V of England a rather unfair advantage when he invaded with the intention of winning the Battle of Agincourt.
Charles VIII (1483-1498). Probably my favourite French king of the lot, for reasons of absurdity alone. Came to the throne aged 13, so his big sister Anne initially ruled as regent: the idea of being ruled by a girl upset the local nobles so much that they rebelled, with foreign backing, resulting in the three year “Mad War”. When Charles grew old enough to rule in his own right, he decided – presumably by this point feeling he had rather a lot to prove – to enforce his claim to the throne of Naples, and marched an army into Italy. He was fairly swiftly forced to march it out again and was scheming a return when he banged his head on a doorframe and promptly expired. He was only 27: he’d barely got started.
All of which meant that he never lived to see the fact that he’d fired the opening volley in a conflict, the Italian Wars, that’d see Europe’s richest and most sophisticated region remade as a battlefield, on which French, Germans and the Church would be enthusiastically pummelling each other for the next six decades. Twat.
Anyway, that’s pretty much it for the Middle Ages, so that’s quite enough of that. But fear not, early modern France fans! I’ll come back and do the last few centuries another time.
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