/me pops more popcorn and settles in for a good story.
Thank you, thank you!
I’m digging this. I have read some Byzantine history but not in the past couple years.
I would like to apologize to my peeps for last episode being so dour; Philippe III’s reign was really quite tragic and I couldn’t think of much funny commentary. However, I’d like to point out that although he gets a bad rep as a pathetic king, Philippe III perservered and DID NOT become an axe murderer despite the horrifying deaths of most of his family members (plus his promising younger brother turning into a maniac) within a few short years. I mean, all that happened to Hitler was he got rejected from art school, and look what happened. Philippe III even took his wife back after she was accused of poisoning his kid; that make not seem like much, but hell, Henry VIII chopped his wives’ heads off for less than that. It’s all a matter of perspective, really.
If I’ve never said so, shame on me, but I really like this thread. Thank You!
I was under the impression that Henry VIII of England chopped off his second wife’s head – a past royal mistress – on the pretext of adultery, so that he could marry his current mistress, with whom he was committing adultery. If I’m anywhere close, a spinoff series “As the Tudor World Turns” would be just as interesting. And you’d get to reuse some of the cast.
ETA: I’m wrong, assuming WP is right. Anne refused to be a mistress; the pretext for execution was high treason (the real reason was miscarriages and a live daughter).
Wonderful thread! I only just found it the other day. Keep up the good work, and maybe start a second thread on the Byzantines (if you can afford the extra time)?
I vote for Capetians AND Komnenoi!
Philippe IV was the elder of the two surviving sons born to Philippe III and his first wife, Isabel of Aragon; he had been only about three-years-old when his mother tumbled from her horse and died, along with her unborn child, and was laid to rest in a black marble tomb in St. Denis. His elder brother Louis and younger brother Robert both died during his childhood, leaving him and his sole remaining full brother, the almost inhumanely ambitious Charles of Valois, and three half-siblings from his father’s second marriage to Marie of Brabant.
In 1284 he married Queen Jeanne of Navarre, who had been raised with him at the French court, praised by chroniclers as a “prudent” and “beautiful” queen, and to whom he seems to have been devoted. A year later Philippe became king, and he ruled France at the climax of the Capetian dynasty, at the height of the nation’s power, balanced on the precipice before the coming of the Hundred Years War and the Black Plague.
Philippe IV was an intimidating motherfucker who could make other men’s balls retract into their body just by fixing them with his stare 1. He was an enigma to his contemporaries, who weren’t sure whether to praise him or piddle themselves in fear. Bernard Saisset, the bishop of Pamiers, said that Philippe “is neither man, nor beast, but a statue… like an owl, the most beautiful of birds that is worth absolutely nothing.” He looked the part of a king, being tall, “golden-blond, ruddy, fair, and seemly, he stood erect and so tall that he was immediately noticed in a crowd.”
He appointed powerful ministers – the one-eyed Flote, Marigny, Nogaret – but it was Philippe who pulled their strings. He was ruthless, cold, and sarcastic, and his only soft spot seemed to be for his kindly, plump wife Jeanne and possibly for their only surviving daughter, Isabella 2, the belle of his court. He and Jeanne also had three surviving sons: Louis, Philippe, and Charles, all of whom were to be kings of France after him. Queen Jeanne founded the College de Navarre in Paris, and led her own armies against rebellious vassals.
Philippe’s ambition brought him into conflict with his own godfather, Gui de Dampierre, the count of Flanders, who had waged war against his own half-brother over the succession to Flanders and Hainaut. Gui attempted to betroth his daughter to Edward, Prince of Wales, and thusly ally himself with England. Philippe attacked him, locked up Gui’s daughter until her death, and invaded Flanders and captured both Gui and his eldest son. Flanders proved too rebellious, and after the French army was defeated there in 1302 Philippe had to make peace and restore Gui’s son Robert to power. To say they hated each other is understating it a bit – Philippe even had a painting made of Gui de Dampierre as a horseman of the Apocalypse.
He also got into tiffs with King Edward I of England, who was married to Philippe’s half-sister, Marguerite. Philippe sent his brother Charles and cousin Robert of Artois to overrun Guyenne, and also began the ‘Auld Alliance’ with Scotland. Edward I didn’t like Philippe getting into bed with the Scots, but peace more or less was made when Philippe’s daughter Isabelle married Edward I’s son Edward, Prince of Wales.
Meanwhile, Philippe got himself into a battle of wills with Rome. Philippe, who was eternally strapped for cash, wanted to gets his hands on the ridiculous amounts of money that the French bishops were wiping their asses with. He tried to tax them so that he could pay for having gold-plated toilet paper holders of his own, which meant that Pope Boniface VIII got all up in his face. The Pope issued a Papal bull called Bull Unam Sanctam, which basically declared that he was the supreme overlord of practically everything. In response, Philippe publically burnt his copy of the bull. The Pope then offered the French throne to the ruler of Austria if he would go kick Philippe’s ass.
Now Boniface VIII was a character. According to legend, he became Pope by whispering “Resign! Resign!” through a secret tube into the chamber of Pope Celestine V, a pious, ancient old peasant who had somehow stumbled into the papacy. Believing the voice was the voice of God, Celestine V retired and Boniface stepped into his shoes.
Philippe assembled some cardinals to call for Boniface’s resignation. They accused the Pope of sodomy, idolatry, and dropping cigarette butts on the ground. The king sent his homies, Nogaret and Sciarra Colonna, to surprise Boniface with an army and slap him around a bit. Boniface then died, supposedly by bashing his head into a wall, but I’m not sure if I believe that.
Guichard, bishop of Troyes, had enjoyed the patronage of Queen Jeanne and her mother, Blanche of Artois, for some years, but by 1300 he had fallen out with the two queens after mismanaging Blanche’s money. He was suspected of having poisoned Blanche when she died suddenly in 1302, but the case was dropped two years later when his two accusers, Jean de Calais and Noffo Dei, retracted their statements. But when Jeanne herself died in 1308, her grieving husband unleashed his fury on Guichard. He was arrested and accused of killing Queen Jeanne by sticking pins into her wax likeness and of trying to poison her sons Louis and Charles. Guichard enjoyed an all expenses paid, year-and-a-half long vacation in the luxurious royal dungeon before being delivered to the Pope for trial, with Philippe IV ominously threatening to judge Guichard himself if the matter was not dealt with to his satisfaction. The same Noffo Dei who had accused Guichard in 1302 admitted to perjury and was hanged in Paris, but Philippe IV seems to have been convinced that Guichard of Troyes had murdered his wife nonetheless. The Pope reassigned Guichard to the diocese of Diakovar in faraway Bosnia, obviously attempting to keep Guichard out of Philippe’s grasp as best he could.
I’mma do the fall of the Knights Templars and the affair of the Tour de Nesle later.
Footnotes:
- Little known fact: his name, like Muad’Dib, is a killing word.
- She later invaded England and deposed her own husband with the aid of her lover, Roger Mortimer.
SOURCES:
Geoffrey de Paris. La chronique metrique attribuee a Geoffrey de Paris, p. 148.
Fegley, Randall. The golden spurs of Kortrijk: how the knights of France fell to the foot soldiers of Flanders in 1302, 2002.
Missisipienne, thanks once again for the update. But I’m puzzled by Note 1. You say that his name was a killing word. Whose name? Philippe IV’s? Do you mean that French soldiers called out “Philippe” as a battle cry? Because I wouldn’t have thought that calling out the name of one’s king in battle was particularly unusual.
Just a couple of notes:
-
Philippe le Bel is Englished as “Philip the Fair,” but like Ethelred the Unready and Ivan the Terrible, the epithet is misleading – neither contemporary Frenchmen nor historians thought he was eminently possessed of fairness, but rather that he was blond and light-complected.
-
Boniface VIII’s bull Unam Sanctam has been fertile ground for anti-Catholic apologists ever since, because it marks the high-water mark of Papal claims to temporal authority. I saw its claims about “the universal authority of the Roman Pontiff” quoted less than a month ago in a theology thread on another board, as if it represented what the Papacy claims to be able to do today.
Hey, you yell out “Philippe Four!” twenty times in a row on a battlfield and if the enemy doesn’t kill you, the guy stuck next to you will. 
He was blond, but “le bel” means “the handsome”; Philippe IV was considered a strikingly handsome man (the bishop of Pamiers likened him to an owl, “the most beautiful of birds”. and it wasn’t because he had big tuffs of feathers on his ears). And anglicized, not Englished.
In Isabelle’s defense, the “She-wolf from France” didn’t much care to be the queen of a king who was a flaming queen himself. One sympathizes.
Also, that Boniface story is priceless.
ETA : re: the Fair, I think **Polycarp **means that by anglicizing his moniker as “the Fair” instead of “the Severly Fuckable” for example, English speakers can be led to believe he earned his title by being just, or fair in his dealings if you will. Which is as far from reality as could be, as we’ll see in next episode 
In 1305, a Frenchman named Raymond Bertrand de Got was elected Pope, took the name Clement V, and as soon as he put on that big hat, Philippe IV walked up behind him and put a collar and chain around his neck. The papal court up and moved to Poitiers, Philippe’s backyard, and Clement V quickly undid everything his predeccesors had ever done that could in any way cause Philippe IV a headache.
Now, I’d like to introduce you to Jacques de Molay. According to his own account at his trial in 1305, he’d been a Templar for about forty-two years, so since about 1265. He became its Grand Master in 1292, about the time that the Order’s star was waning; with the loss of the Crusader states, the Knights Templar no longer had a role to play. He must’ve been a friend to Philippe IV, for he stood as godfather to Philippe’s only surviving daughter, Isabella. Indeed, Philippe’s sons were educated by Templars. But their friendship was fracturing; Philippe needed money, and the Knights Templar, a cadre of warrior monks, had money. Lots of money. And Philippe owed them money, money he had no intention to repay.
The Templar treasurer, Jean de Tour, had illegally lent Philippe IV the extravagant sum of 400,000 florins, and when Jacques de Molay found out, he had Jean de Tour stripped of his habit and thrown out of the Order. Jean de Tour complained to Philippe IV, who asked Molay to relent and restore Jean de Tour to the Order. When he saw that Molay had no intention of listening to him, Philippe had Clement V write Molay a letter, demanding Tour’s reinstatement. According to the chronicle of the Templar of Tyre, Molay “threw the said letter into the fire, which was burning in his hearth.” 1
Molay apparently also exchanged “strong and rough words” with Philippe IV; I can only imagine that Molay told Philippe that his mother sucked cock in Hell, because Philippe decided that motherfucker had to die. And Philippe was gonna send all his homies straight to Hell with him.
Jacques de Molay seems to have no idea of the storm on the horizon. He attended the funeral of Philippe’s sister-in-law, Catherine de Courtenay 2, on October 11, 1307. The next day, he and almost every other Knight Templar in France were arrested. They were subjected to starvation and torture, and confessed to a number of bizarre crimes, including “obscene kisses”, worshipping an idol in the shape of a black cat, and rampant mansex.
After putting the Templars on trial, Philippe IV and Clement V had Molay sentenced to being burnt at the stake. Molay faced his death with admirable bravery, but he did not curse Philippe and Clement as he was being burnt. This legend seems to have been a combination of the words of a different Templar, who did declare that the Pope and the king would answer for their crimes in God’s presence ‘within a year and a day’, and Jacques de Molay’s statement, recorded by Geoffrey de Paris, that God would avenge his death.
Now, while the Templars were on trial, a scandal was in the making in royal family. Philippe’s three sons had taken three brides. Louis, the heir to the throne, had married his cousin Marguerite of Burgundy 3, the daughter of Robert II of Burgundy and Agnes, herself the daughter of King Louis IX. The younger two sons, the able Philippe and straight-laced Charles, had married a pair of sisters: Jeanne and Blanche of Burgundy, daughters of Count Otto IV of Burgundy and Mahaut of Artois.
Mahaut of Artois, the mother of Blanche and Jeanne of Burgundy, was the daughter of Robert II of Artois, and therefore a descendant of Louis VIII. She married Count Otto IV of Burgundy, and on the death of her brother Philippe, she gained control of Artois, disinheriting Philippe’s son Robert III of Artois. Her nephew fought her furiously for the right to rule Artois, ransacking her capitol, in 1316. Mahaut was a powerful, intelligent woman who carried around books in leather bags, although after her only son died in 1317 she only read books of piety, forsaking the romances she had earlier enjoyed. Don’t forget Mahaut; you’ll be seeing her again.
By 1314, Philippe and Jeanne had a small clutch of daughters. Marguerite had given Louis a daughter, Jeanne. Blanche and Charles likewise had a couple of children who died young.
Marguerite and Blanche were caught using the Tour de Nesle as a love-nest, enjoying a liaison with two brothers, the courtiers Gautier and Philippe d’Aulnay. Jeanne knew of their adultery and covered for them, but was not herself involved with the d’Aulnay brothers. King Philippe was enraged at discovering that his daughters-in-law were voracious cockmongering sluts. He had the three princesses and the d’Aulnays arrested and imprisoned. Marguerite and Blanche were forced to watch their lovers being castrated, disembowelled, and decapitated.
Jeanne spent about a year imprisoned, but alone of the princesses she was not abandoned by her husband. She was released after Philippe IV’s death and returned to her husband Philippe.
Blanche was locked away in the Chateau Gaillard until 1325, when she was transferred to the castle of Gavray. She died before April 5, 1326. Charles had divorced her in 1322 and remarried. Elizabeth A. R. Brown points out that there’s no documentary evidence for the widespread belief that she became a nun at Maubisson. She does seem to have borne a child to her jailer, but what became of this child I do not know.
Marguerite was imprisoned in the Chateau Gaillard, and remained there until her convenient death in August 1315, shortly after her husband became king. He got over his grief quickly and remarried five days later to Clemence of Hungary.
Whatever Molay may or may not have said, both Clement V and Philippe IV died within the year. Clement died in April, about a month after Molay’s execution, and Philippe that November, after being injured while boar-hunting. The Capetian dynasty, which had seemed so certain and strong, would not long survive him.
Footnotes:
- It must be mentioned here that Jean de Tour was eventually allowed back into the Order, because he was among the Knights Templar arrested in 1307.
- Catherine was the daughter of Philip de Courtenay, the Latin Emperor of Constantinople. She had married Charles of Valois, Philippe IV’s brother, who hoped to claim the throne of Constantinople through her.
- Marguerite’s crippled but scholarly sister, Jeanne, married the future King Philippe VI, the son of Charles of Valois.
SOURCES:
Barber, Malcolm. The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple, 1993.
Brown, Elizabeth. “Blanche of Artois and Burgundy, etc.” Negotiating community and difference in medieval Europe: gender, power, patronage, and the authority of religion in Latin Christendom, 2009.
Demurger, Alain. The Last Templar: The Tragedy of Jacques de Molay, Last Grand Master of the Temple, 2009.
Labarge, Margaret Wade. A medieval miscellany, 1997.
And thank you again. It would have been helpful to future historians if these people hadn’t all named their kids the same few names! Also if they hadn’t insisted on keeping it “all in the family” by intermarrying to an amazing degree!
The Romans were even worse in some ways ;). Noble families typically stuck to just a handful of given names for older sons, so for example the Meinhardiners were particularly fond of ( unsurprisingly ) Meinhard and Englebert among others. You’d start seeing diversity of names more with younger sons who tended not to inherit, though when they did they’d often start a new naming trend.
They could be pretty stubborn - unless it is a records confusion Henry XIII of Bavaria appears to have named his three eldest daughters in a row “Agnes.” Now the younger two died young, but all three were alive when they were given their names. He must have really liked that name :D. Or more likely was utterly uninterested in daughters.
Interestingly enough, Philip is of course a Greek name ( Philipos ) brought to the French court by Philip I’s Russian mother. From there it rapidly proliferated throughout the royalty and nobility of western Europe. Meanwhile Louis ( Ludwig, original Hludwig ) was of course one of the Carolingian royal names along was Charles ( Karl ), reaching back in France to Charlemagne ( Charles I ) and his son Louis I the Pious, respectively.
Didn’t stop them from having four kids. Besides, Edward II can’t be described as a “flaming queen”, unless you consider everyone who’s sexually attracted to men as being a “flaming queen”. By all accounts, Edward was fairly aggressively masculine, and his hobbies were things like digging ditches, building walls and doing ironwork.
Edward II was into things that it was frowned upon for medieval princes to be into, and I’m not talking about mansex. He liked things like rowing, swimming, thatching, and frolicking with peasants. His hobbies sound harmless to us but they really freaked his peers out. It didn’t help that he fawned all over his comparatively lowborn favorite Piers Gaveston, which made his earls throw up in their mouths a bit, at least as much from jealousy as anything else. Much like his much earlier predeccesor, William II Rufus, Edward had a personality that’s more sympathetic to modern people than to the people of his time.
To keep this properly Capetianish, here’s an excerpt from a joking and playful letter he sent to Louis of Evreux, Isabella’s uncle and Philippe IV’s half-brother, whom Edward seems to have been fond of. In the letter Edward promises to send Louis: “…a big trotting palfrey that can hardly carry… some of our misshappen hounds from Wales, who can well catch a hare if they find it asleep, and some of our running dogs, which go at a gentle pace, for well we know you take delight in lazy dogs…And dear cousin, if you would care for anything else from our land of Wales, we will send you some wild men if you like, who will know how to give your young sprigs of nobility their education.”
Louis X really began as Louis I – Louis I of Navarre, king of Navarre since the death of his mother, Queen Jeanne. Personally, his stubbornness earned him the nickname of le Hutin, “the quarrelsome”; he was an aggressive, brave twenty-five year-old man with a love for tournaments and tennis. When his father, Philippe IV, was mortally injured from a hunting accident, he called Louis to his bedside and told him, “for my part, I love you above all others,” counseled him to listen to his uncles and be kind to his people. He then died, leaving Louis to become king of France.
By Christmas 1314, the Good Lord gave to Louis:
Hundreds of cooked Templars,
Tons of royal debt,
A pack of rapacious cousins,
Two brothers in the wings,
Two crowns a-gleaming,
Two uncles a-scheming,
One daughter of questionable paternity,
And an imprisoned, disgraced wiiiiiiife!
In fact, he wasn’t even crowned until the following year for lack of funds to hold a coronation. Poor Louis X. Like several of his predeccessors, I feel like his brief reign is unfairly maligned. He freed the serfs and allowed Jews to return to France (they had been expelled by his father Philippe IV in 1306); Jews had also found a sanctuary in Navarre for some years. By medieval king standards he was a big softie.
The first crisis set before him was in Flanders. In 1302, Philippe IV and Robert II of Artois had invaded Flanders in revenge for the massacre of Frenchmen at Bruges, and suffered a humiliating defeat on the fields of Kortrijk, in a battle that came to be known as the Battle of the Golden Spurs for the golden spurs taken from the boots of the dead French soldiers. One set of those golden spurs belonged to the unfortunate Robert II of Artois.
Gui de Dampierre’s son, Robert, now ruled Flanders, and was determined to take back several cities that had been captured by France. When Louis X came to his throne, Robert III of Flanders 1 set about starting mad shit. First, he refused to do homage for his French lands. Then he beseiged Lille, so Louis assembled a grand army and marched toward Flanders, but the war was called on account of rain. Torrents of rain soaked his soldiers and supplies and made marching nigh-impossible – the army slogged back covered in mud.
In court, Louis X fell under the influence of his uncle, Charles of Valois (his other uncle, Louis of Evreux, preferred his younger brothers, Charles and Philippe). Charles of Valois had long held a grudge against Philippe IV’s powerful and wealthy chamberlain, Enguerrand de Marigny. He accused Marigny of sorcery and had him executed; Louis X actually left money to Marigny’s family in his will. He seems to have regretted allowing Charles of Valois to destroy the man.
His next task was finding another wife. Louis’ choice fell on Clemence of Hungary, a niece of Charles of Valois’ deceased wife, Catherine de Courtenay 2. The only problem was that Louis’ first wife, Marguerite, was still alive and still in prison. Marguerite did Louis the great favor of dying and he mourned her for entire *seconds *before marrying Clemence.
Louis was playing tennis in summer 1316, gulped down a cold drink, and took ill. He died on June 5, 1316. He was twenty-six years old. Bizarrely, he had two funerals – well, really three. The first funeral was a normal affair. But Louis’ brother Philippe had missed it, and so a funeral was held again for Philippe. Then, centuries later, during the French Revolution Louis’ bones were tossed into a ditch, retrieved, and re-buried in 1817.
Louis X left a pregnant queen, which raised a major question: who should inherit the throne of France? If the child were a son, it would inevitably fall to the boy. But Louis X had only a single daughter, Jeanne, or as we shall call her, Jeannette, to distinguish her from the many other Jeannes at the time, from his first marriage to Marguerite of Burgundy. Poor Jeannette’s paternity was questioned because of her mother’s adultery. France had never had a queen regnant.
Louis’ tall, slender, ambitious brother Philippe was so close to the throne he could taste it.
Clemence of Hungary’s child was born that November, and it was a boy, christened Jean. The baby-king Jean I would only ‘rule’ for a few days, before his death as he was being held by Mahaut de Artois, the mother of Philippe’s wife, Jeanne of Burgundy.
Philippe holed himself up in the Cathedral of Reims with some of his homies, and had himself crowned king of France. He justified this by saying that since his niece Jeannette was a five-year-old girl (indisputable) that she could not rule France (debateable 3) and that anyway, her mother had smoked more cock than a chicken rotisserie and so Jeannette might not even be a Capetian anyway (questionable). Nevertheless, Jeannette became queen of Navarre in her own right as Queen Jeanne II 4.
Footnotes:
- Robert of Flanders was married to yet another Burgundian princess: Yolande, a cousin of Louis and Philippe’s wives Marguerite and Jeanne. Yolande’s first husband had been Jean-Tristan, son of King Louis IX, who had died on Crusade. Yolande’s sister, another Marguerite, was one of Charles of Anjou’s wives. The Capetians tapped a seemingly inexhausteable supply of Burgundian ladies.
- I can’t help but think that all this marrying in circles must’ve gotten very boring. Everyone knew all the same family stories, etc.
- If the infant Jean could be king, then Jeannette could hardly have done a worse job. “I wanna pony!” “Quickly! The queen demands a pony!”
- Jeannette married her cousin, yet another Philippe, the son of Louis of Evreux and Marguerite of Artois. They had a pack of children, including Charles the Bad, who was burned to death in his own bed in a terrible manner in 1387.