[987 - 1337] Kingdom of France in the Middle Ages

In the year of our Lord 987, the land we now call France was not a nation, but a patchwork quilt of ambitions. The great dynasty of Charlemagne had withered. In its place, a council of powerful dukes and counts—men who saw themselves as equals, not subjects—gathered to choose a king. They did not choose a mighty warrior or a brilliant scholar. They chose Hugh Capet, the Duke of the Franks. Why? Because he seemed weak. His personal lands, the royal domain, were a modest strip of territory between Paris and Orléans. The great lords of Normandy, of Aquitaine, of Flanders, believed he would be a king in name only, a puppet whose strings they could all pull. They were wrong. This single decision would set in motion a 350-year struggle, the slow, often bloody, and brilliant forging of a kingdom. Life for most people at this time was bound to the soil and the seasons. Society was a rigid pyramid, what scholars called the three orders: those who prayed (the clergy), those who fought (the nobility), and those who worked (the peasantry). For the 90% who worked, life was a cycle of back-breaking labour. Imagine the tang of woodsmoke in the air, the constant damp of a wattle-and-daub hut, the earthy smell of the fields. Their world was the village, their horizon the next hill. They owed their lord labour, a share of their crop, and absolute loyalty. Their diet was a monotonous pottage—a thick stew of grains and whatever vegetables were available—and coarse, dark bread. Meat was a rare luxury. Yet it was their sweat, powered by new technologies like the heavy wheeled plough that could turn the dense northern soils, that fed the entire system. Above them were the lords, the knights. Their lives were dedicated to war. They dwelled in cold, formidable stone keeps, their walls hung with tapestries more for insulation than decoration. A knight’s status was his horse, his armour—a heavy coat of mail weighing up to 50 pounds—and his sword. Their world was one of honour, violence, and lineage. But even a powerful duke was not a king. He was a vassal of the king, yet in reality, his power in his own lands was absolute. This was the challenge the early Capetian kings faced: how do you rule men who command more soldiers and own more land than you do? For a century, they did it by surviving. Hugh Capet and his successors made a brilliant strategic move: they ensured their own son was crowned as co-king before they died, establishing the principle of hereditary rule. They were patient. They arranged strategic marriages, chipping away at the domains of their rivals, adding a town here, a county there. The royal domain grew, slowly, like a persistent vine. Then, at the turn of the 13th century, a new kind of king emerged. Philip II, known as Philip Augustus, was not just a survivor; he was a predator. Cunning, administrative, and utterly ruthless, Philip looked at the vast French territories held by the English King—Normandy, Anjou, Aquitaine—and saw an intolerable threat. He used law, subterfuge, and war to systematically dismantle this English "Angevin Empire" on French soil. The climax came in 1214 at the Battle of Bouvines. On a swampy field in Flanders, Philip faced a coalition of English, German, and Flemish forces. It was a desperate gamble. A chronicler wrote that the clash of steel was so loud it drowned out the trumpets. Philip himself was unhorsed and nearly killed, saved only by his loyal knights. But by day's end, the French had won a stunning, decisive victory. For the first time, a sense of shared identity, of being "French," began to stir. After Bouvines, the royal treasury swelled, and the king's power was no longer a theory, but a terrifying reality. He used this newfound wealth to pave the mud-choked streets of Paris, to build a new wall around the growing city, and to begin construction on his great fortress: the Louvre. With this new power came a cultural explosion. This was the age of the great cathedrals. All over northern France, soaring structures of stone and glass reached for the heavens. Forget the dark, heavy fortresses of the past. This was Gothic architecture, a revolution of engineering. Flying buttresses, like skeletal fingers, supported the walls from the outside, allowing them to be thinner and pierced by enormous windows. Inside a cathedral like Chartres or Notre Dame de Paris, the effect was breathtaking. Sunlight, filtered through vast panes of stained glass depicting biblical stories in jewel-like colours, illuminated the cavernous space. For the common person, who lived in a world of brown and grey, stepping into a cathedral was like stepping into heaven itself. It was a testament to both God's glory and the growing power and wealth of the French kingdom. This era of confidence produced perhaps France's most revered king: Louis IX, the only French monarch to be made a saint. Where Philip Augustus was a pragmatist, Louis was a man of profound faith. He was famous for dispensing justice, not from a remote throne room, but in the woods of Vincennes, sitting under an oak tree, available to any subject, rich or poor, who had a grievance. This wasn't just good piety; it was brilliant politics. It established the king as the ultimate source of justice in the land, bypassing the local lords. But his piety also drove him to the crusades, vast and costly expeditions to the Holy Land that ultimately ended in his capture in Egypt on the first attempt, and his death from dysentery outside Tunis on the second. The final great Capetian of this period, Philip IV, "the Fair," was a chilling synthesis of his predecessors: as pious in appearance as Louis IX, as ruthless in action as Philip Augustus, and with a modern, bureaucratic coldness all his own. He believed in the absolute, God-given majesty of the French crown. When he needed money to fund his wars, he expelled the Jews and seized their assets. When he clashed with the papacy over his right to tax the clergy, he sent his men to arrest the Pope himself. His most dramatic move came at dawn on Friday, October 13th, 1307. In a stunningly coordinated operation across the entire kingdom, his agents arrested thousands of Knights Templar. This wealthy, powerful, and secretive military order, which had answered only to the Pope, was accused of heresy, blasphemy, and unspeakable acts. Under horrific torture, confessions were extracted. The order was crushed, its vast treasury flowing into the king’s coffers. Whether the Templars were guilty or Philip was simply executing the most brutal corporate takeover in history remains a subject of debate. But it demonstrated the terrifying reach and efficiency of the new French state. By 1328, the Capetian miracle seemed complete. From the weak duke chosen in 987, they had forged a powerful, centralized kingdom, the most populous and prosperous in Europe. But then, it all unravelled. Philip IV’s three sons all took the throne and died young, leaving no male heirs. The direct line of Hugh Capet, after more than 300 years, was extinguished. A succession crisis erupted. Who had the rightful claim? A French cousin, Philip of Valois? Or the King of England, Edward III, whose mother was a daughter of Philip the Fair? In 1337, this dispute would ignite a conflict that would last for over a century, a war that would redefine both France and England forever. The age of the Capetians was over. The Hundred Years' War was about to begin.