I can’t think of any of those either. Although traditionally, the Capetians and the Plantagents are both descended from the twin sons of Robert of Hesbaye. The story seems way too cute to be real, but. . .
I think the folks enjoying this thread would get a kick out of a web comic I discovered over the summer. It’s called Hark! A Vagrant and it’s a fun take on history and literature with a bit of geekery and random silliness thrown in. WARNING: Here There be Swear Words! Try a few of my favorites anyway, won’t you?
http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=10
http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=14
On the night of August 21, 1065, Gerald of Wales, a student in Paris, awoke to the sounds of wild jubilation. Church bells were ringing; trumpets were blown; people poured into the streets to celebrate. So many bonfires were lit that Gerald at first thought the city was ablaze. He looked out his window and spoke to two elderly women passing by with torches in hand, who informed him that a prince had been born.
Louis VII, who declared himself “dismayed by the great number of [his] daughters” (four in 1065, soon to be joined by a fifth daughter, Agnes, a couple of years later) was overjoyed. His third queen, the much-younger Adele of Champagne 1, had given birth to a son named Philippe Auguste, also called Dieudonne, ‘god-given’, because after 30 years without an heir it seemed the child had been sent directly from heaven.
Across the Channel, King Henry II of England was afflicted with the only thing worse for a medieval king than having no sons: having too many sons. Eleanor had given him four surviving sons, sometimes collectively known as the eaglets but really more like a clutch of little demons. There was Henry the Young King, who we’ll call Young Henry for short, who had been married to Marguerite, Louis VII’s elder daughter by Constanza of Castile, since 1160. The second was Eleanor’s favorite, the hellraising Richard, who was betrothed to Louis and Constanza’s second daughter, Alys2. The third was the eloquent and scheming Geoffrey, betrothed to the heiress of Brittany, who’s “tongue is smoother than oil” according to Gerald of Wales. The fourth was John, Henry’s favorite and a greedy, paranoid little snot 3.
Things had also begun breaking down between Eleanor and Henry, and she encouraged her sons to break shit and run wild. Henry had also been on the outs with his former friend, Archbishop Thomas Becket, which ultimately resulted in Becket’s murder at Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. The shit hit the fan in 1173, when Young Henry, Richard, and Geoffrey joined forces against their father, with Eleanor attempting to join them. Young Henry sought refuge with his father-in-law, Louis VII, but eventually a truce was reached between Henry II and his unruly sons.
This was the situation that Philippe Auguste inherited when he became king in 1180 upon his father’s death.
In 1083, the Plantagenet brothers turned one against the other. This time it was Young Henry vs. his father, Richard, and Geoffrey. Young Henry died in 1183 without surviving heirs 4; his father declared that “he had cost me much, but I wish he had lived to cost me more.”
Geoffrey of Brittany became close friends with Philippe Auguste, and spent much of his time that wasn’t spent plotting against his father or brothers at Philippe’s court. Philippe was so grief-stricken at Geoffrey’s death in 1186 5 that he clung to Geoffrey’s coffin at the funeral and had to restrained.
Meanwhile, domestic problems rocked the ruling family of Flanders. Count Philip of Flanders had married Elisabeth, one of the three tragic children born to Count Raoul of Vermandois by his illegal marriage to Alix-Petronille, Eleanor of Aquitaine’s younger sister. Elisabeth’s brother, Raoul II, had contracted leprosy and had relinquished Vermandois to his sister and her husband in 1167. Raoul and Elisabeth’s sister, Eleanor, married four times but never had any children. Philip and Elisabeth were likewise barren.
In 1175, Philip caught his wife in bed with a knight named Gautier de Fontaines. Philip beat Gautier with a club and then, according to Benedict of Peterborough, had the half-dead man suspended by the feet over a disgusting sewage ditch until he died. Without children of his own, Philip turned his attention to his niece Isabelle, the eldest child of his sister Margaret’s marriage to Count Baldwin V of Hainaut. He dowered Isabelle with Artois and then offered the ten-year-old, blonde, blue-eyed girl to Philippe Auguste.
Fifteen-year-old Philippe Auguste was wearying of his mother and his uncles running the show. He wanted powerful allies of his own in court. He married Isabelle in April 1180; during the ceremony an usher accidentally knocked over some candles onto the heads of the young royal couple.
Philippe’s mother, Queen Adele, was enraged and left the court for her brother Thibaut’s court in Champagne and open warfare erupted between the Champagne/Blois clan and the Flanders/Hainaut clan. The nobles at court snickered at Isabelle, mocking her as too low-born to be Philippe’s queen (strange, because Philippe’s own mother had been a count’s daughter herself). As it became clear that Philip of Flanders and Isabelle’s father Baldwin of Hainaut could not be trusted nor relied upon, Philippe Auguste began to have second thoughts about the marriage. In 1084 he announced that he intended to divorce Isabelle.
Well, Isabelle was not having it. According to Gislebert of Mons, she ran out onto the streets of Senlis dressed only in her shift like a penitent, walking barefoot from church to church, weeping and praying openly, handing out alms to the passersby. The commoners united behind their beautiful, teenage queen. The peasants and lepers ran to the gates of the palace and caused such a tumult that Philippe Auguste could not finish his meeting. Overwhelmed by the public support for Isabelle, Philippe took her back.
Isabelle suffered a miscarriage and a stillborn daughter before giving birth to the future Louis VIII on September 3, 1187. The day after his birth, a solar eclipse occured, all while the Parisians celebrated wildly.
Next episode: “Croissants and Crusades”!
SOURCES:
Baldwin, John. The government of Philip Augustus, 1991.
Hosler, John. Henry II: A medieval soldier at war, 2007.
Footnotes:
- She was the youngest daughter of Louis VII’s old enemy, Thibaut IV of Champagne. Confusingly, her brothers Thibaut V of Blois and Henri I of Champagne had married Louis VII’s daughters by Eleanor of Aquitaine, Marie and Alix, respectively. This made Thibaut V and Henri I at once Louis’ sons-in-law and brothers-in-law, and also made them brothers-in-law to each other. DID I JUST BLOW YOUR MIND?
- Alys became one of Henry II’s mistresses and Richard refused to marry her on grounds that she had borne a child to his father. If true, this child did not survive long.
- John’s my favorite, but I’m not going to make excuses for him. He was a greedy, paranoid little snot.
- Marguerite had given birth to a son, William, in 1177, who was premature and died soon after birth. They had no more children. In 1182, according to The History of William Marshal, Young Henry accused her of having an affair with the great knight William Marshal.
- Allegedly a tournament accident, although that may have been a cover story fed to Henry II.
Now we come to Philippe Auguste’s young adulthood, which is overshadowed (as most everyone was at that time) by his relations with Richard, the eldest surviving son of Henry II and soon to succeed him as king.
There’s been a lot of debate about the precise nature of the relationship between Richard and Philippe. You get historians rabidly ‘defending’ Richard from accusations of homosexuality, while others try to promote him as a gay icon. Personally, I find the sexual sadism 1 attributed to Richard more toubling than the possibility that he kinda liked the man-sex, but whatever. My personal conclusion is, based on my research, that Richard was what we’d consider functionally bisexual.
Regardless, Philippe and Richard became so close that they might as well have had joint checking. Roger of Hoveden informs us that they “ate every day at the same table and from the same dish, and at night their beds did not separate them. And the king of France loved him as his own soul; and they loved each other so much that the king of England was absolutely astonished and the passionate love between them and marveled at it.” Having lost his adored Geoffrey, Philippe got cozy with Geoffrey’s brother.
Unlike his brother John, Richard was genuinely respected and feared by his contemporaries. He had a forceful personality, and knew how to make a grand entrance. English chroniclers were ecstatic when he became king, even though he had basically hounded his father into an early grave. Their delight was tempered somewhat when Richard turned out to be interested in England mostly as a source of income – “I’d sell London if I could find a buyer!” was the famous quote William of Newburgh attributed to Richard.
Meanwhile, Philippe’s queen Isabelle had become pregnant again. She died in childbirth with twin boys in March 1190. Her twins did not long survive her. She was only twenty years old.
Richard I and Philippe had both already taken the cross and made plans to head for the Holy Land. In July 1190, not quite three months after Isabelle’s death, Philippe headed out overland over the Alps, rendezvous-ing with Richard in Messina 2. While in Italy, Richard tried to take a hunting hawk from a villager, believing that only noblemen deserved to possess such a bird (this story is told in the Gesta of Richard I). The irate villagers attacked him with sticks, and when Richard hit one man with the flat of his sword the blade snapped, leaving him scrambling to pelt anything at hand at them so that he could escape.
When they arrived in Acre (Akko), things began really breaking down between Richard and Philippe. They quarreled over who they supported for the kingship of Jerusalem – Guy de Lusignan, Richard’s vassal and the husband of Queen Sibylla of Jerusalem, was Richard’s choice, while Philippe preferred his cousin Conrad of Montferrat, the husband of Sibylla’s sister Isabella. Richard had tossed aside Philippe’s sister Alys in favor of Berengaria. While Philippe was deathly ill, Richard came to visit him and played a sadistic joke on him.
From The Continuation of William of Tyre: *As soon as [Richard] arrived he inquired after [Philippe’s] illness and how he was. The king replied that he was at God’s mercy and felt himself severely afflicted by his illness. Then King Richard said to him, “And as for Louis your son, how are you to be comforted?” The king of France asked him, “What about Louis my son that I should be comforted?” “It is for this,” said the king of England, “that I have come to comfort you, for he is dead.” *
In fact, the child, the future King Louis VIII 3, WAS ill but not dead. The chroniclers seem to have felt that Richard knew very well that little Louis was not dead, but that he told Philippe that either to kill him with shock and grief, or as some sort of cruel joke.
By the end of 1191, Philippe had had enough. He turned around and headed back to France, stopping in Rome on the way to cattily bitch about Richard to the Pope. Richard was still in the Holy Land, covering himself with glory and pissing off a lot of people he should not have been pissing off. On his way back from the Third Crusade Richard was captured by Duke Leopold of Austria who accused Richard of having murdered his cousin Conrad of Montferrat 4. During his captivity, Richard sent the Pope a totally pompous letter in which he blamed everyone but himself for the failure of the Third Crusade (amusingly, the only person he had a good word for was Saladin). Meantime, John was trying to cozy up to Philippe, promising to marry the unfortunate Alys in return for Philippe’s support for his own hostile takeover of Richard’s domains.
As Richard prepared to leave captivity, Philippe readied himself for war. Philippe marched on Rouen, the capital of Richard’s dukedom of Normandy, but was so unnerved by the unlocked castle gates and the confident defenders that he burned his seige engines and fled. He also offered to pay the Holy Roman Emperor to keep Richard locked up indefinitely. Obviously, this didn’t work and when Richard was freed Philippe sent John a letter that said, “Look to yourself; the devil is free.”
Richard set out to win back the castles and land Philippe had seized. In 1198, while retreating from battle with Richard at Gisors, the bridge collapsed under Philippe’s forces, and Richard snidely noted that Philippe “drank of the river”. A year later, Richard ended up on the business end of a crossbolt and died.
Meanwhile, Philippe remarried in 1193 to the beautiful and virtuous Ingeborg of Denmark, only to be overcome with a sudden and bizarre revulsion for her. He desperately tried to divorce her. Ingeborg fought to be recognized as his wife and queen for the next twenty years (!!!). Philippe took up with Agnes of Meran, one of several accomplished daughters of the duke of Meran 5 and married her in 1196 despite the fact that Ingeborg was still very much alive. The Pope excommunicated him but Philippe held out until 1200, when he finally relented and took Ingeborg back. Agnes died a year later, but Philippe never reconciled to Ingeborg.
As for poor Alys, Philippe’s sister who had been spoiled by Henry II and rejected by Richard I, she never married John. Instead, in 1195 Philippe foisted her off on a minor lord, Count Guillaume of Ponthieu, who was twenty years younger than she was. Philippe seems to have been hoping they wouldn’t have children, and he could get his hands on Ponthieu that way, but Alys and Guillaume defied expectation by producing a daughter and heiress, Marie, in 1198. I would like to think that Alys had as happy an ending as could be hoped.
Philippe found King John of England easier to deal with than his brothers, and he chipped away at the Angevin Empire until pretty much all John had left was England, and then he held onto that by his fingernails. They tried to make nice by arranging for Philippe’s son Louis to marry John’s niece Blanca of Castile (henceforth known as Blanche), but this gave the hot-headed Louis a pretext to invade England in right of his wife.
Personally, Philippe was a difficult character, an enfant terrible with a calculating attitude and no liking at all for frivolity. He forbade swearing, and anyone caught swearing at his court would be dunked in the river. He also hated tournaments and forbade his son Louis from taking part in them. He was incredibly generous to lepers and the poor, and supported reformed prostitutes, but he was vicious to the Jews, all at odds with his father’s example. He had a weird nervous disorder and was so affected by being lost in the forest for two days in 1179 that he was unable to speak for some time after being found.
The end of his reign I’ll save for the post on his son Louis VIII, as Louis reigned for such a short time and he was really active during his father’s last years.
SOURCES:
Gillingham, John. Richard I, 2002.
Saul, Nigel. The Three Richards, 2006.
Footnotes:
- Roger of Hoveden alleged that Richard “carried off the wives, daughters, and kinswomen of his freemen by force and made them his concubines; and when he had sated his lust on them he handed them over to his knights for whoring.” Yeah, no surprise THAT tidbit didn’t make it into the Robin Hood mythos, huh.
- Richard’s mother Eleanor was chasing after them with his intended bride, Berengaria of Navarre, who Richard finally married in Cyprus.
- Philippe’s surviving son by Isabelle of Hainaut.
- Well, he probably DID murder Conrad, but it was still totally uncool to bring it up.
- Her sisters were St. Hedwig of Andechs and Gertrude, queen of King András II of Hungary, who was brutally murdered in 1213 by Hungarian nobles.
This is wonderful, Miss. Please continue as and when you get the opportunity.
Agreed, this is great stuff. Needs to go on Threadspotting.
Thanks for the kind words guys! I hope everyone is enjoying this jaunt through a couple hundred years of medieval French history as much as I am.
In the Life of St. Hugh of Lincoln, there’s a incident recorded in 1200 in which the titular saint was visited by two princes: Prince Louis, the heir to the French throne, and Arthur of Brittany, the son of Philippe Auguste’s old friend Geoffrey of Brittany. 1. Louis, who was then thirteen years old, asked St. Hugh to meet with his young bride, Blanche (renamed from Blanca) of Castile. Blanche, who was Arthur’s first cousin, had recently been fetched from faraway Spain by her grandmother Eleanor of Aquitaine and brought to France. The little princess had become distressed after Louis had been lightly injured at a tournament 2 and, having taken this as a bad omen, wept and fretted.
St. Hugh met with Blanche and spoke to her, soothing her fears. Blanche dried her eyes and took heart. She would go on to have almost thirty years with Louis, although he would not reign long, and many children, although only some of them would survive to adulthood.
Now I would like to introduce you to a colorful character named Countess Ida of Boulogne. She was the eldest daughter and heiress of Mathieu of Alsace, himself the son of Thierry of Alsace and Sybil of Anjou, who I mentioned before 3. Ida had been born to Mathieu’s bizarre marriage to Countess Marie of Boulogne; I say it was bizarre because of the fact that her mother had been a nun. Allow me to explain.
Marie of Boulogne was the daughter of King Stephen of England and Countess Matilda of Boulogne. She unexpectedly inherited Boulogne in 1159 after the deaths of both her brothers, Eustace and William. As an heiress she was valuable on the marriage market, and was plucked from her nunnery and married off to Mathieu of Alsace. After the birth of two daughters, Marie asked her husband for permission to return to the cloister, which he graciously gave. After her father Mathieu was killed in 1173 while fighting Henry II of England, Ida, now a girl of about twelve and a countess in her own right, decided to marry for love and keep marrying until she found it.
By 1190, Ida had been married and widowed twice and more men had gone down on her than would on the Titanic. According to Lambert of Ardres, “…so left without a man, [Ida] indulged herself in worldly delights and pleasures of the body. She fell passionately in love with Arnoul II of Guînes, and tried as hard as she could to seduce him; or rather, with typical feminine fickleness and deception she feigned that emotion.”
All while Ida and Arnoul were sending each other sickeningly sweet love notes, King Philippe was conspiring to get Ida married off to his homie, Renaud de Dammartin. Renaud carried off Ida 4 and locked her up in one of his castles. Ida sent letters to her lover, Arnoul of Guînes, crying about her treatment, and Arnoul rode to her rescue. The only problem was that Ida and Renaud conspired to lure him into a trap. Arnoul was captured by Renaud’s cronies, and had to be rescued himself, this time by the archbishop of Reims. Ain’t that the shit. Hey, Arnoul, those tear-stains on her letters were probably just water droplets that she sprinkled onto the paper.
Renaud de Dammartin quickly forgot where his bread was buttered. He became embittered with Philippe Auguste over a quarrel with a bishop, and soon after he allied with King John of England. Good friends make the worst enemies.
Now I’ll tell you of the rise of Pierre Mauclerc. He didn’t quite come out of nowhere; he was a great-grandson in the male line of King Louis VII and thusly a distant cousin to Philippe II, but as the younger son of a cadet branch of the royal family he was not expected to be anyone of too much importance. As his name suggests, he had studied for the priesthood but cast off the clerical robes. He was crafty, without many scruples, and a poet and scholar.
After the death of Arthur of Brittany in 1203 and the imprisonment of Arthur’s sister Eleanor by their uncle King John of England, the inheritance of Brittany fell to their half-sister Alix, the daughter of Constance of Brittany by her third husband, Guy de Thouars. Philippe II selected Pierre Mauclerc to marry Alix, and by this marriage in 1212 he became one of the most powerful lords in the kingdom. Despite this, he craved the earldom of Richmond, an honor traditionally held by the dukes of Brittany, and he conspired to get his hands on it.
Also in 1212, Countess Jeanne of Flanders married Prince Fernando (Ferrand) of Portugal. Jeanne’s father, Count Baldwin IX of Flanders, had been the brother of Prince Louis’ mother, Isabelle. He died in 1205 on the Fourth Crusade, leaving Jeanne as his heiress. Through her mother, Jeanne was a granddaughter of Marie of Champagne, Philippe Auguste’s half-sister. Shortly after their wedding, the newlyweds were captured by Prince Louis, who was determined to take back some of his mother’s lands, including Artois, which had been seized by Baldwin IX after her death. Ferrand was humiliated at having to give up these territories. He turned to King John of England.
While all this was going on, Jeanne’s sister Margaret eloped with Bouchard d’Avesnes, a minor nobleman. Jeanne was furious and got the Pope to condemn the marriage.
The French royal forces attacked Flanders in 1213, but were repelled at Dammes by the Flemings and forces sent by Renaud de Dammartin and King John. King John was organizing an expedition to take back the lands in Poitou that he had lost to Philippe II. He was joined by his half-brother William de Longespee, earl of Salisbury; his nephew the Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV; Ferrand and Jeanne of Flanders; and Renaud de Dammartin. After a brief skirmish, John also worked out something shady with Pierre Mauclerc so that he could advance through Brittany.
John was beseiging La Roche-au-Moine when Prince Louis arrived and chased him across the Loire. John lost his baggage and many good men, and he ran off without a fight. At about this time, in April 1214, Blanche of Castile gave birth to a son, named Louis, the future king and saint Louis IX.
Two months after this royal birth, Otto IV, William de Longespee, Renaud de Dammartin, and Ferrand of Flanders met Philippe II’s forces at the village of Bouvines. The rebels were smashed. William de Longepee and Ferrand were unhorsed and taken prisoner; Otto IV escaped by the skin of his teeth. Renaud held out the longest, bravely fighting in the center of the melee, but he too was defeated.
Renaud de Dammartin was imprisoned and his lands were stripped from him and given to Philippe Hurepel, Philippe II’s son by Agnes of Meran. His daughter by Ida, Matilda of Boulogne, married Philippe Hurepel in 1223. At last realizing he would never be freed, Renaud committed suicide in 1227.
Ferrand remained in captivity for twelve years.
William de Longespee was freed and returned to England.
After Bouvines, some of the English nobles abandoned John and joined up with Prince Louis, encouraging him to invade England in right of his wife Blanche (who through her mother was a granddaughter of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine). Louis decided that John deserved to be deposed for murdering his nephew, Arthur of Brittany. The Pope condemned Louis’ plans, and Philippe II confronted his son, forbidding him to invade England. Louis exploded with fury, saying, “It is not up to you to decide matters concerning England… I fight for the inheritance of my wife!”
After that outburst, Philippe refused to speak to his son.
In 1216 Louis arrived in England, and in London he was welcomed as a king. The king of Scotland met him and did homage to him. Several English earls abandoned John for Louis, including William de Longespee; it was said William resented his brother John for ‘consoling’ William’s wife during his imprisonment after the disaster at Bouvines. King John died in October 1216, and his nine-year-old son was crowned Henry III. The English barons began abandoning Louis for Henry III, and his support whittled away. Louis eventually gave up and submitted to peace talks.
In Flanders, Countess Jeanne was still trying to obtain the release of her husband Ferrand, to no avail. Philippe II tried to get her to divorce Ferrand and marry Pierre Mauclerc (who’s wife Alix had recently died). Bouchard d’Avesnes, the husband of Jeanne’s sister Margaret, decided to make his move and try to become count of Flanders. He rebelled against Jeanne but was captured. Desperate, his wife Margaret finally agreed to divorce him in return for his release in 1221. She then remarried to Guillaume de Dampierre and had a son by him, but the Pope decided that the terms of her anullment to Bouchard were invalid – leaving Margaret in the bizarre position of having TWO living husbands, and children by both, and BOTH marriages being invalid and BOTH sets of children being of dubious legitimacy. She abandoned Guillaume and returned to Bouchard.
Then, when the whole thing couldn’t get weirder, it did: in 1225 an imposter arrived in Flanders, claiming to be Count Baldwin IX of Flanders, miraculously returned from the dead. Riots ensued until the imposter was executed and order was restored thanks to Louis VIII.
The Pope was all fired up by the rise of the Cathar heresy, a sect that preached hippie shit like vegetarianism and reincarnation. The Cathars were running around southern France, bumming everyone out by being celibate and poor and starving, and the Pope wanted them gone, like, yesterday. Louis VIII enthusiastically agreed to turn all eventy-bazillion 5 Cathars into extra crispy fried chicken.
Louis VIII quickly found himself at odds with his cousin Thibaut IV of Champagne. Thibaut’s father, Thibaut III, had himself been the son of Henri I of Champagne and Marie, Philippe Auguste’s half-sister. He died on the Fourth Crusade, leaving his young son and widow, Blanca of Navarre, a mountain of debt and a contested succession to the county of Champagne. Thibaut IV grew into a brilliant, cultured, and contrary young man. He also seems to have been in love with Louis VIII’s wife Blanche, so as you can imagine Louis was not too fond of him. Thibaut wrote lots of love poetry, shagged lots of wenches, and put forth the least amount of effort possible in fighting the Cathars, and Louis was so fed up he threatened to revoke Thibaut’s lands.
While campaigning and introducing heretics to the pointy end of his sword, Louis VIII came down with a fatal case of dysentery. For some godforsaken reason, the recommended medical treatment for dysentery in the Middle Ages was having sex with random wenches, so his friend Archambaud VIII of Bourbon found some virgin and sent her to Louis’ bedchambers. When this virgin informed Louis that she had been sent to give him sexual healing, Louis told her, “No, girl, it will not be so. There is no way I would commit a mortal sin.” He then ordered Archambaud to arrange an honorable marriage for her.
Louis shortly thereafter died on November 8, 1226. He had ruled France for only a handful of years.
It was rumored that Thibaut IV had him poisoned.
SOURCES:
Sibly, W.A. The chronicle of William of Puylaurens: the Albigensian crusade and its aftermath, 2003.
Footnotes:
- Arthur fought his uncle King John for the throne of England, and was likely murdered by his uncle in 1203. His sister, Eleanor, spent her life in confinement under the supervision of John and later King Henry III of England.
- As I mentioned before, Philippe II forbade his son from participating in tournaments, probably because of this incident or one like it. It couldn’t have helped that Geoffrey of Brittany, Philippe’s beloved companion and Arthur’s father, had been killed in a tournament accident.
- Mathieu was the brother of Philip of Flanders, who I mentioned last episode, and of Margaret of Flanders, herself the mother of Isabelle of Hainaut. So Ida was a first cousin of Prince Louis’ mother.
- History, sadly, does not record if he chased Ida down and stuffed her into a ‘bridal sack’. I like to think he did.
- The exact figure.
This is wonderful for me, because I have a glancing acquaintance with most of this stuff from the side of England. So most of the French names you mention are familiar to me, but not the details, while I know a bit more about the English names you mention in passing.
This is really good stuff, Miss. Thank you again.
“They’re evil twiiiins! Well… only one of them is evil. The other is just a twin.”
This episode, “Capetians Courageous!” begins in winter 1226 as the French army limped back from Auvergne with the body of their king, Louis VIII. On his deathbed he had made his bishops and barons swear loyalty to his son and heir, Louis, and named his wife, Queen Blanche, as regent.
Queen Blanche, upon being told of her husband’s death, went nearly mad with grief; the chroniclers say that she would’ve killed herself on the spot had she not been restrained. Her husband of 26 years had died and left her as the guardian to his kingdom and their son. A pack of vicious nobles began to circle the royal family, bearing their teeth, waiting to strike.
From the large brood that had been born to Louis VIII and Blanche, six had survived to 1226: Louis IX (aged twelve), Robert (aged ten), Jean-Tristan (aged seven), Alphonse (aged six), Philippe-Dagobert (aged four), Isabelle (aged about a year and a half), and Charles, a baby of nine months.
Louis was promptly crowned at Reims. Noticeably absent from the ceremony were Pierre Mauclerc, duke of Brittany and Hugh X de Lusignan, count of La Marche 1. Thibaut IV of Champagne tried to come but Blanche sent him away.
The Poitevin barons secretly made deals with the English to recognize Henry III and Henry’s younger brother, Richard of Cornwall as their overlords. Pierre Mauclerc supported them, and all the while Philippe Hurepel 2, the legitimated son of Philippe II and Agnes of Meran, a man of about twenty-seven, conspired to replace Blanche as the kingdom’s regent. Intrigues and power plays were going on all around. The reign of Louis IX was almost over before it began.
Pierre Mauclerc promised to return Normandy to England, and in response Henry III sent him soldiers and his teenage brother, Richard of Cornwall. Pierre Mauclerc began burning fields, throwing chairs through windows, kicking in doors, and giving noogies to anyone he chanced upon. Queen Blanche tried to assemble an army against him, but even the loyal nobles were pissing their breeches at the thought of throwing down with the duke of Brittany; some sent only two knights apiece. At one point some random townspeople tried to fight off the barons menacing their young king.
Fortunately, there were only two constants in the mercurial nature of Thibaut IV of Champagne: his dislike for his cousin Louis VIII, and his adoration of Louis’ widow, Blanche. He showed up with a force of 300 knights and sent Pierre Mauclerc running for cover. Blanche beseiged him and kicked his ass. Both Hugh X de Lusignan and Pierre Mauclerc suddenly found it prudent to make peace. Their spirits were not broken, however, and they would both remain thorns in the side of Blanche and Louis for many years to come.
Their enemies claimed that Blanche filled the court with priests and Spaniards, and it was true that Blanche, a dark-haired, passionately Catholic woman, raised her children strictly and piously. Of the royal children, there are a couple of recorded anecdotes which are charming and allow us to catch a glimpse of them as children, rather than just names and ages. Agnes of Harcourt, abbess of Longchamp, tells us of when Princess Isabelle knitted her first cap, which her brother Louis then asked for. Much to his surprise, Isabelle refused, saying she preferred to donate it to the church. Louis asked for the next cap she knitted, which Isabelle agreed to give him, but only if she did knit another.
Princess Isabelle was just as devout as her sainted brother, perhaps moreso. Another anecdote describes how she, as a little girl, didn’t want to emerge from her covers to pray one chilly morning, so hid inside her blankets to pray and was picked up and almost tossed in the laundry by a maid!
While Louis was accomplishing the difficult task of growing up a teenage king, far away, down south in the beautiful county of Provence, the count Ramon Berenguer had married a beautiful woman, Beatrice of Savoy, a “second Niobe” according to Matthew Paris, and they had four beautiful daughters: Marguerite, Eleanor, Sancia, and Beatrice. Count Ramon Berenguer had some problems with the count of Toulouse, and went to the French court to get the king to intercede. Queen Blanche saw an excellent opportunity. Louis IX needed a bride, and Ramon Berenguer’s eldest daughter, thirteen-year-old Marguerite, was lovely, pious, and cultured, and in the event that the count died without a son she stood to inherit Provence.
Count Ramon Berenguer was only too happy to see his daughter become queen of France, and Marguerite was escorted to Sens where she was met by Louis, his mother, his brothers Robert and Alphonse, and a great number of French nobles. They were married in 1234.
The marriage was a rare success, although it seems not to have been consummated for several years, probably on account of the bride’s youth. Blanche turned out to be the original Monster-in-Law. She tried to keep Louis and Marguerite seperate as much as possible, and Jean de Joinville, Louis’ personal friend and compatriot, tells us of how Louis and Marguerite used to meet clandestinely on the winding staircase connecting their chambers in Pontoise. Louis would post guards to warn him of his mother’s approach, so that he could rush back to his own room without Blanche catching him with his own wife (!!!).
Jean de Joinville also tells us of Marguerite’s near death in childbirth, and of how as Louis sat at her beside, Blanche entered the chambers and took his hand, saying, “Come away, you have no business here.” Marguerite cried out, “Alas! You will not let me see my lord either in life or death!” and swooned. Louis, thinking she had died, rushed back to her side.
Meantime, Henry III of England was on the prowl for a bride of his own. His first choice was Marjorie, a daughter of King William I of Scotland; the little Scottish princess had been brought up in England as a hostage for her father’s good behavior. Henry III was enamored with her and Hubert de Burgh, the power-mongering Justiciar of England and the husband of Marjorie’s elder sister, was euphoric at the prospect of being the king’s brother-in-law. Hubert even secretly sent a letter to the daughter of the duke of Austria, who had been suggested as a bride for Henry III, telling her that Henry was impotent and effeminate, and that she’d be better off without him. But the other English barons, perhaps fearful of Hubert de Burgh becoming any more powerful than he already was, complained that it was humiliating to have their king marry the younger sister of the wife of one of his own vassals, nevermind if her father was a king.
Henry III gave up on Marjorie, who married the earl of Pembroke instead. Another attractive prospect entered his sights: Jeanne, the heiress of Ponthieu. Jeanne’s father was Simon de Dammartin, the brother of the failed rebel Renaud de Dammartin. Her mother was Marie, Countess of Ponthieu, herself the daughter of Count Guillaume of Ponthieu by Alys, the half-sister of Philippe II.
Queen Blanche very nearly shit a brick at this development. She didn’t want Henry III getting his hands on Ponthieu and then mounting any more attempts to reclaim his French lands. She conspired with her sister, Queen Berenguela of Castile, to marry Jeanne of Ponthieu off to Berenguela’s own widower son, King Fernando III of Castile, and safely get her out of Henry III’s grasp 3. Instead, in 1235 Henry III married Eleanor of Provence, the twelve-year-old sister of Marguerite, Louis’ wife. The sisters were close friends and would remain in contact their entire lives. The third sister, Sancia, would marry Henry III’s younger brother Richard of Cornwall in 1243 and briefly became queen of Germany.
As for Thibaut IV of Champagne, he inherited the kingdom of Navarre in 1234 from his good-natured and immensely fat uncle, King Sancho VII Sanchez 4. He went Crusading in 1239 and didn’t do a whole hell of a lot before returning home.
In 1237, more shit got stirred up, this time when Alphonse, Louis IX’s younger brother, married Jeanne, the heiress of Toulouse. Isabelle of Angouleme, the widowed queen of England and, as she never failed to remind people, the mother of the king of England the Empress of Germany, was pissed off because Alphonse had broken off his engagement to her own daughter by Hugh X de Lusignan in order to marry Jeanne of Toulouse. She incited her husband, a veteran of the 1226/7 revolt, to switch his allegiance from Louis IX to his stepson, Henry III of England. It seems that the final straw for Hugh X de Lusignan came in 1240, when Alphonse was formally endowed with the county of Poitou, making him Hugh’s overlord. He snubbed Alphonse at his Christmas court of 1241 by refusing to do homage to him.
Louis IX came to the assistance of his brother, and Henry III came to the assistance of his stepfather, and their armies clashed at Taillebourg. The English army was soundly defeated. Hugh X de Lusignan lost nearly everything in the aftermath. His wife Isabelle was accused of sending men to try to poison Louis IX, and she fled to the sanctuary of Fontevrault Abbey, where she died in 1246. Several of her Lusignan children, having few prospects left, left to seek their fortunes at their half-brother’s court in England.
In 1244, Louis came down with an illness so severe that everyone despaired for his life. Jean de Joinville describes how a maid, attending on the king, gave him up for dead and shrouded him as a corpse. Upon recovering, he declared his intention to take the cross and lead another Crusade. His mother was horrified and begged him not to go. He was joined by his three brothers, Alphonse, Robert, and Charles, all of them hungry for glory and adventure and God. Preparations for the Crusade would take several years.
Louis, his brothers, his army, and the vassals who had also taken the cross set out in 1248, accompanied by Queen Marguerite and her youngest sister, Beatrice, who two years before had married Louis’ brother Charles. The sea-crossing was terrifying. As they approached Cyprus, a careless maid accidentally set aflame some of the royal couple’s sheets. Marguerite lept up, stark naked, and grabbed the burning sheets and threw them overboard. Between Cyprus and Damietta the ships sailed encountered a storm that tossed some of the ships as far as the coast of Palestine.
At last they landed in Egypt, where they were delayed by the Nile overflowing, as it is wont to do. Disaster befell them at the Battle of Al Mansurah, where Louis’ brother Robert was killed 5. Pierre Mauclerc survived Al Mansurah and Joinville relates how he rode up to the king on horseback, with a cut on his face that bled into his mouth, followed by Breton soldiers on foot. He spat out blood, said, “God’s head! Have you ever seen such rascals?”
Louis himself was defeated in battle by the Mamluk Baibars, a Kipchak Turk with an eye gone eerily white from a cataract. His army was chopped to pieces by bazillions of Saracen and Turk shock troops slashing them with scimitars, and flinging Greek fire and the severed heads of their comrades into their faces. In the ensuing mess, Louis became very ill but refused to abandon his men. He was captured but bought his captivity and agreed to hand over Damietta.
Marguerite, meanwhile, was back in Damietta, and heavily pregnant. She received news of Louis’ capture, and was overcome with nightmares of Saracens attacking her as she slept. She dismissed everyone from her bedchambers except for one eighty-year-old knight, and then she made him swear that if the Saracens attacked that he would kill her rather than allow her to be taken prisoner. The knight assured her that he would so, for “I had already thought that I would kill you before they captured us.”
Marguerite gave birth to a son, Jean-Tristan, who was born on the Seventh Crusade in 1250 and who would die 20 years later on the Eighth. After Louis’ release, he reunited with Marguerite and they spent the next few years reorganizing the kingdom of Jerusalem. Two more children would be born to them in the Holy Land: Pierre in 1251 and Blanche in 1253.
His brothers Alphonse and Charles, evidently having had enough of Crusading, returned to France in 1250.
Queen Blanche, Louis’ mother who had been watching over France while he was away, died in 1252. It took a long time for the news to reach the royal couple so far away in the Holy Land. Jean de Joinville found Marguerite weeping, and when he said to her, “It is the woman you hated most who is dead, and now you show deep grief,” Marguerite replied that it was not for Blanche that she wept, but for the king’s sadness over Blanche’s death.
It was time to return home. Pierre Mauclerc, that ornery old bastard, had survived the Seventh Crusade only to die on the voyage home.
After Queen Blanche’s death, Alphonse and Charles governed the kingdom until Louis’ return. Now, Charles of Anjou, was distinguished by his incredible ambition. The contemporary chronicler, Giovanni Villani, says about Charles that he “laughed but little… [Charles was] large and muscular in person, with an olive complexion and a large nose and looked the king more than any other lord. He sat up late at night and slept but little, and was in the habit of saying that a great deal of time was lost in sleeping.”
Charles was very tempted by the Pope’s offer of the kingdom of Sicily. Alphonse thought it was a bad idea, and Louis outright told him to forget about it. Thwarted, Charles got involved in the troubles between Margaret of Flanders 6 and her son, Jean. What happened is that Margaret had eloped, while underage, to Bouchard d’Avesnes and had several children with him, including a son named Jean. When Bouchard was imprisoned by her sister Jeanne, Margaret agreed to divorce him if Jeanne would release Bouchard. She then married Guillaume de Dampierre and had two sons with him. The Pope decided that the divorce from Bouchard was invalid, making her marriage to Guillaume bigamous. This also meant that neither of her two sets of children were considered quite legitimate. As her elder sister Jeanne died childless, this resulted in a VERY big mess as the succession to Flanders and Hainaut was disputed.
Margaret decided she wanted her son Guillaume III de Dampierre to succeed her. Her elder son, Jean d’Avesnes, had a hit put out on his half-brother, Mafia-style. Margaret gave Jean the finger and joined forces with her other son, Gui de Dampierre, and they went to war with Jean. In 1253, Jean defeated them and captured Gui. Margaret then offered her rights to Hainaut to Charles of Anjou if he would take it back from Jean d’Avesnes and rescue Gui. Jean d’Avesnes had joined forces with his brother-in-law, Count Willem III of Holland, and together they beat the crap out of Charles.
At that point it seems everyone decided that Jean d’Avesnes was not to be fucked with. Louis waggled a finger disapprovingly at Charles for getting involved in family squabbles. Gui spent three years imprisoned by his brother before Louis ransomed him out in 1256, and after that he was like, “Fuck it, you can have Hainaut.” Jean died a year later and left Hainaut to his equally warlike son. Gui de Dampierre did become count of Flanders and so the inheritance was split.
Charles was not done, however. Some years later he would accept the Pope’s offer and set out to conquer Sicily. In 1268, he captured the kingdom’s rightful Hohenstaufen heir, the sixteen-year-old Conradin, and beheaded him. His wife Beatrice enjoyed a brief reign as a queen like her sisters before her own death in 1267.
Louis IX, meantime, being apparently ridiculously optimistic, was exchanging letters with the Great Khans of the Mongols seeking an alliance. Their correspondence went something like this:
FRANCE: You’re big and mean and I’m cultured, so you should become a good Christian so we can get MARRIED MARRIED MARRIED.
MONGOL EMPIRE: Bitch, what? Get in the kitchen and make me my dinner.
It came to naught.
In 1267, Louis IX called for a new Crusade. The response was a big “meh.” Nevertheless, he plowed ahead, assembling a force to take on his old enemy Baibars. He set out with his brother Charles and his sons Jean-Tristan and Philippe, but upon arrival in Tunis the entire army became sick on bad drinking water. Jean-Tristan died August 3, 1270, followed by Louis IX himself on August 25.
His eldest son, Philippe III, was declared king. Philippe left his uncle Charles to do whatever Crusading was left to do, and hastened back to France.
SOURCES:
Howell, Margaret. Eleanor of Provence, 2001.
Jackson, Peter. The Seventh Crusade, 2009.
Pernoud, Regine. Blanche of Castile, 1975.
Richard, Jean. Saint Louis, 1992.
Footnotes:
- Hugh X de Lusignan married Isabelle, Countess of Angouleme, in 1220 after the death of her first husband, King John of England. Bizarrely, Isabelle had been betrothed to Hugh’s father twenty years before, before King John stole her away and married her himself. With John, she was the mother of several children, including King Henry III of England. With Hugh she produced a litter of little Lusignans.
- His nickname derived from his bristling, unruly hair. His wife was Matilda, the heiress of Flanders, and the daughter of the notorious Ida of Flanders by Renaud de Dammartin, who had committed suicide in 1227 when it became clear that he would never be released from captivity.
- Amusingly, years later Henry III and Eleanor’s son Edward would marry Jeanne and Fernando’s daughter Leonor (Eleanor) of Castile.
- King Sancho was the brother of Thibaut’s mother, Blanca, and of Berengaria, who had married Richard I of England.
- Joinville says Robert and the Templars rashly pursued the Turks into the town of Al Mansurah, where they fought bravely but were cut down. Matthew Paris claims that Robert was drowned while trying to flee back across the river.
- The sister of Countess Jeanne from last episode.
The impression I’ve gathered is that Isabelle d’Angouleme was extremely beautiful and utterly uninterested in much of anything but herself. While John of England (her husband) was alive, he’d hit anything in sight, even women who made it clear they were uninterested in him, or whose husbands were key allies of John. His contemptuous, not to say vicious, treatment of women may have been one of numerous factors that led the English barons to rebel and force the Magna Carta onto John.
But I was under the impression that after John died, Isabelle married her original fiance, Hugh des Lusignan, not his son. So what do I know?
’
S.D. Church, in his biography of King John, King John: New Interpretations, says that Isabelle was originally engaged to Hugh IX de Lusignan before John carried her off, and after his death she married Hugh X, Hugh IX’s son by his first wife, Agathe de Preuilly.
Roger of Hoveden says that John’s brother, King Richard, had originally brokered the match between Hugh IX de Lusignan and Isabelle, the daughter of Aymer, count of Angouleme. They exchanged vows (verba de presenti) but although she was in Hugh IX’s custody they did not live as man and wife because she was too young. In other words, it was a marriage in every sense except that it had not been consummated. No wonder he was pissed when John carried her off!
Shortly after John made off with Isabelle in 1200, Hugh IX turned around and married Isabelle’s first cousin, Matilde, a daughter of Aimer’s brother Vulgrin.
And yes, John was a notorious pussyhound. Sleeping with his half-brother William’s wife while William was imprisoned was low, even for him. My favorite John anecdote concerns his passion for Margaret, the illegitimate daughter of King William of Scotland and the wife of Eustace de Vesci. Eustace discovered that John had schemed a meeting with his wife, and sent a prostitute in her place. In the dark of the night John mistook her for Margaret, but when dawn came and it dawned on him that she was NOT Margaret, he was furious. Eustace de Vesci became one of the Magna Carta sureties, by the way.
Another of John’s mistresses was Hawise, countess of Aumale in her own right. As a teenage heiress she had been married to William de Mandeville, earl of Essex, who was old enough to be her father, or her grandfather. After William de Mandeville died in 1189, Richard wanted to marry her off to his crony, William de Forz, commander of the royal crusading fleet. She refused, and in retaliation Richard seized her chattels. Hawise gave in and married William de Forz. They had a son, also named William, who became her heir, before William de Forz died in 1195.
Widowed for a second time, Richard again arranged for her to marry, this time to a minor lord from Artois, Baldwin de Bethune. Hawise and Baldwin were married before July 1196. Together they had a daughter named Alice, who died in 1215.
Richard of Devizes calls Hawise “like a man in everything but virility” (by this he means fertility, since she only had two children; it seems Hawise was a bit of a tomboy). Hawise appears to have been John’s mistress for a long time. There’s an odd Pipe Roll entry from 1209 in which Peter des Roches sent King John a barrel of wine in apology for having forgotten to give Hawise a belt that John had sent her.
Anyway, Hawise’s son William was a turncoating no-goodnik who’s word wasn’t worth spit; he sided with whoever looked most likely to be winning during the hostilities between John and the barons. William of Aumale, like Eustace de Vesci, was also one of the Magna Carta sureties, but afterwards came over to John’s side. He also did homage to Prince Louis in 1217, but once again repented and John accepted him back and made him emissary. John was not known for his generosity or forgiveness, and his treatment of William of Aumale is very out-of-character for him. I strongly suspect that William was his biological son. Almost John’s only unambiguously good trait was his care for his small army of illegitimate children.
Interesting stuff! Were you unable to sleep last night, because according to my timestamp, you wrote that at 3 in the morning (possibly 2 if you’re in Central Time)?
Anyway, for whatever reason you wrote it, thank you.
I noticed that interest in this thread has dropped off somewhat, although I have received some very nice PMs about it, for which I thank y’all. Would anyone like me to continue?
I am planning to do a similar project sometime in the future, but this one about the Komnenoi dynasty of the Byzantine Empire (I have been here long enough that I do not worry much about being thought a one-trick pony). I can certainly finish up the Capetians first, though, but if everyone’s Capetian’d out, that’s fine.
I, for one, am never Capetianed too much. I’m sure there are others who would agree.
I’d also be interested in any dynasty of the Byzantine Empire, about which I know virtually nothing except that they were, well, Byzantine.
I like it! I was just thinking last night that it had been a while since your last post!
Yes and no. The Valois kings were impressed with the Italian Renaissance and all the architectural and artistic marvels that came with it. When Louix XI permanently moved the king’s court from Paris to Tours, he and the rest of the Valois brought in countless Italians with them to get them to do here what they had done back home. The other noblemen followed suit and it soon became something of a fad to have an ostentatious château or hunting lodge in the region. If you were anybody, you had a château in the Loire vale, and that was that. The more impressive the better.
Even after François the First moved the royal court back to Paris, the court kept coming back there on hunting trips. The fact that François himself had a mistress in the region, who also happened to be the wife of a local lord, probably played a role as well ;).
As to why Louis XI chose to move there in the first place, well, he didn’t feel too safe in Paris and he had been raised in the region. The local nobles supported him as well. The number of local strongholds left over from the previous 5 centuries of quasi-constant fighting possibly played a part, but I’m not positive.
Oh, and I almost forgot : if any of you is interested in the Capetian coming-and-goings that resulted in the Hundred Year War I wholly recommend Maurice Druon’s superb heptalogy The Accursed Kings, which chronicles the lives of Phillippe the Fair, his three sons and his opportunistic, self-serving, power-hungry and completely corrupt brother. Also Robert of Anjou, whose constant manipulations and plots turned out to be a major catalyst for the war… all for him to get his county of Anjou back from his aunt.
It’s wholly in the spirit of this thread : almost 100% pure historical fact, but skipping the dry parts to get to the good bits : the intrigues, the betrayals, the feuds, the adulteries, the power plays etc…
Toujours les Capetiens! You haven’t even reached the House of Burgundy and all th fun they caused!
Okay, sweet! Onto Philippe III, then.
You have to really feel for this guy. He went on the Eighth Crusade only to see the entire French army suffer from disease, and then his brother and his father die in rapid succession. Now King Philippe III, he turned around to head back to France, only to hit a storm at sea ‘with waves like mountains’ which destroyed many ships. They limped onto Italy, where his pregnant wife, Isabel of Aragon, was thrown from her horse and badly injured. She went into labor, delivered a stillborn child, and died of the trauma.
Thibaut II of Navarre (son of Thibaut IV of Champagne), the husband of Philippe’s sister Isabelle, also died in Italy while returning from the Crusade. Thibaut’s widow, Isabelle, died two months later in April 1271. Philippe III at last arrived in Paris in May 1271, having lost his father, brother, wife, unborn child, sister and brother-in-law. His uncle, Alphonse of Poitiers, who had stayed behind in the Holy Land, also died that August as he tried to return home. Yet another of Philippe’s sisters, Marguerite, would also died in childbirth that year.
So began the tragic reign of Philippe III, a timid, unlearned man with a small nose, always clad in a hair shirt, an unlucky king who must’ve believed himself born under a bad sign.
Since Thibaut of Navarre died childless, his brother Henri, a fat, “kindly-faced” man, according to Dante, succeeded him. Henri of Navarre had married Philippe III’s cousin, Blanche of Artois, the daughter of Robert of Artois who was killed on the Seventh Crusade in 1250. Blanche also had a brother, Robert II of Artois, who was born posthumously.
King Henri and Blanche’s only son died horribly in 1273, when his nurse accidently dropped the infant from the battlements of their castle. Henri himself died a year later, aged only twenty-five. Queen Blanche, now the regent for her toddler daughter, became nervous. She decided to entrust the keeping of her daughter to her cousin Philippe III, on the condition that Jeanne would marry one of Philippe’s sons when she came of age and thusly unite the crowns of France and Navarre. This done, Blanche then married Edmund, earl of Lancaster, the younger brother of King Edward I of England, a marriage that infuriated her brother Robert II of Artois, “for he well thought that the king of England had no love for the king of France.” Blanche departed for England, leaving her young daughter in Philippe III’s custody.
Philippe III himself remarried in 1274 to Marie of Brabant, daughter of Count Hendrik III of Brabant. Marie’s eldest brother, Hendrik IV, seems to have been mentally retarded and he was deposed in favor of the next brother, Jan I of Brabant, a debonair, womanizing poet and warrior. He had been married to Philippe III’s sister Marguerite, losing her and their son in childbirth in 1271.
At court, Marguerite quickly made an enemy of Pierre de la Broce, a surgeon-barber of Louis IX who had made good and became a chamberlain in the reign of Philippe III. When Philippe’s eldest son by Isabel of Aragon, Prince Louis, died suddenly and mysteriously, the villainous Broce saw an opportunity to be rid of Queen Marie. He had his relation-by-marriage, Pierre de Benais, the bishop of Bayeux, spread a rumor that Marie had her stepson poisoned. The papal legate to France at the time, Simon de Brion, wrote a legal deposition concerning the scandal, in which he states that in 1276 Pierre de Benais told him of the rumor of Queen Marie’s supposed poisoning of Prince Louis. He investigated and found other rumors attributing the prince’s death to ‘unnatural vices’ of Philippe III. The king himself complained to Simon de Brion that a ‘prophetess’ named Elizabeth de Sparbeek had been slandering him and claimed that his ‘vices’ would result in the deaths of all his children. This ‘prophetess’ was interviewed and she implicated the queen in the death of the prince.
About this time, Marie gave birth to her own son, named Louis after his deceased half-brother. Shortly after her son’s birth she was charged with her stepson’s murder and imprisoned. An unlikely champion took up the queen’s cause: Arnoul de Wesemaele, a Knight Templar from a family of hereditary marechals to the dukes of Brabant. Ten years before, Arnoul and his brothers had led an armed revolt against Marie’s brother Jan when he became duke. He and his brothers were captured and excommunicated; Arnoul reconciled to the church and became a Knight Templar. Now he set out to prove the innocence of the sister of the man who had ruined him.
Arnoul interviewed Elizabeth de Sparbeek, who confessed that the bishop of Bayeux had been trying to pin the prince’s death on Marie. That trail quickly led to Pierre de la Broce, who was arrested. Pierre de Benais fled to Rome, and Broce was hanged in 1278. Still it was rumored that Marie was guilty, and her brother Jan sent a knight to France to defend her honor and challenge her accusers to combat. Marie was evidently reconciled to her husband, and she gave him two more daughters, Blanche and Marguerite 1, but curiously when he died Philippe III did not mention her in his will.
In 1279, Philippe III’s double-first cousin, Charles 2, visited and a tournament was held in his honor. Philippe’s youngest brother, Robert of Clermont, was knighted and took part in the tournament, where he received blows to the head so severe that he nearly died. His head trauma left him permanently insane 3.
Meanwhile, Philippe’s uncle Charles of Anjou was ruling Sicily, but his ambition knew no bounds. He’d had designs on the Imperial crown of Germany before the Pope thwarted him, and now he cast his eye to Byzantium. Before he could strike, his subjects revolted against him in an act known as the Sicilian Vespers. Some Frenchmen had been groping Sicilian women, and were attacked with fists, rocks, weapons, and anything else at hand. The Sicilians then appealed to the Pope for help, but finding themselves ignored, sent a message to King Pedro III of Aragon.
Pedro III was married to Constance, daughter of Manfred, himself an illegitimate son of the HRE Friedrich II, who had inherited Sicily by right of his mother. Charles of Anjou had slaughtered the Hohenstaufen heirs of Friedrich II, but Constance had escaped his grasp and married Pedro. Pedro III of Aragon responded, and came head-to-head with Charles of Anjou. Basically, crazy shit started going down. The Pope promised Philippe III the crown of Aragon for his second son, Charles, if he would conquer Aragon.
The invasion of Aragon was a total bumfuck disaster. The French fleet was smashed and Philippe’s forces were dogged by his old enemy, dysentery. At last, Philippe’s eldest son, seventeen-year-old Philippe, convinced his uncle Pedro III 4 to allow the royal family to flee safely back to France.
Philippe III barely made it back to France before he died on October 5, 1285. His son, now Philippe IV, was a different sort of man entirely.
Footnotes:
- Marguerite married the widower King Edward I of England and had two sons with him. Her sister Blanche married Rudolf von Hapsburg.
- The son of Charles of Anjou and Beatrice of Provence, and also the future Charles II of Sicily.
- Despite this, he married and fathered the Bourbon branch of the royal family.
- Pedro III of Aragon was a brother of Isabel, Philippe III’s first wife and Philippe and Charles’ mother.
SOURCES:
Arbois de Joubainville. Histoire des Duc et des Comtes de Champagne.
Caciola, Nancy. Discerning spirits: divine and demonic possession in the Middle Ages, 2003.
Lillich, Meredith. Rainbow like an emerald: stained glass in Lorraine in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, 1991.
Tilley, Arthur. Medieval France: a companion to French studies, Volume 5, 1965.