In the course of the twelfth century a power grew up within the bounds of the Western Kingdom which in extent of territory threw the dominions of the French King into insignificance. The two great powers of northern and southern Gaul, Normandy and Aquitaine, each carrying with it a crowd of smaller states, were united in the hands of a single prince, and that a prince who was also the king of a powerful foreign kingdom. The Aquitanian duchy contained, besides the county of Poitou, a number of fiefs, of which the most important were those of Perigueux, Limoges, the dauphiny of Auvergne, and the county of Marche which gave kings to Jerusalem and Cyprus. ♦Union of Aquitaine and Gascony. 1052.♦ To these, in the eleventh century, the duchy of Gascony, with its subordinate fiefs, was added, and the dominions of the lord of Poitiers stretched to the Pyrenees. ♦Conquests of William of Normandy. Ponthieu. 1056.
Domfront. 1049.
Maine. 1063.♦ Meanwhile Duke William of Normandy, before his conquest of England, had increased his continental dominions, by acquiring the superiority of Ponthieu and the immediate dominion, first of the small district of Domfront and then of the whole of Maine. Maine was presently lost by his successor, and passed in the end to the house of Anjou. ♦Union of Maine and Anjou. 1110.♦ But the union of several lines in descent in the same person united England, Normandy, Anjou, and Maine in the person of Henry the Second.
♦Dominions of Henry the Second.♦
For a moment it seemed as if, instead of the northern and southern powers being united in opposition to the crown, one of them was to be itself incorporated with the crown. ♦Momentary union of France and Aquitaine. 1137.♦ The marriage of Lewis the Seventh with Eleanor of Aquitaine united his kingdom and her duchy. A king of Paris for the first time reigned on the Garonne and at the foot of the Pyrenees. ♦Their separation. 1152.
Union of Aquitaine, Normandy, and Anjou. 1152-1154.♦ But the divorce of Lewis and Eleanor and her immediate re-marriage with the Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou again severed the southern duchy from the kingdom, and united the great powers of northern and southern Gaul. Then their common lord won a crown beyond the sea and became the first Angevin king of England. ♦Britanny. 1169.♦ Another marriage brought Britanny, long the nominal fief of Normandy, under the practical dominion of its Duke. The House of Anjou thus suddenly rose to a dominion on Gaulish soil equal to that of the French king and his other vassals put together, a dominion which held the mouths of the three great rivers, and which was further strengthened by the possession of the English kingdom. But a favourable moment soon came which enabled the King to add to his own dominions the greater part of the estates of his dangerous vassal. ♦Claims of Arthur of Britanny.♦ On the death of Richard, first of England and fourth of Normandy, Normandy and England passed to his brother John, while in the other continental dominions of the Angevin princes the claims of his nephew Arthur, the heir of Britanny, were asserted. ♦Possible effects of his success.♦ The success of Arthur would have given the geography of Gaul altogether a new shape. The Angevin possessions on the continent, instead of being held by a king of England, would have been held by a Duke of Britanny, the prince of a state which, though not geographically cut off like England, was even more foreign to France. ♦Annexation of Normandy, Anjou, &c. 1202-1205.♦ On the fall of Arthur, Philip, by the help of a jurisprudence devised for the purpose, was able to declare all the fiefs which John held of the French crown to be forfeited to that crown, a sentence which did not apply to the fiefs of his mother Eleanor. In the space of two years Philip was able to carry that sentence into effect everywhere on the mainland. ♦1258.♦ Continental Normandy, Maine, Anjou, and Touraine, were joined to the dominions of the French crown, and by a later treaty they were formally surrendered by John’s son Henry. Poitou went with them, and all these lands may from this time be looked on as forming part of France. ♦Character and effects of the annexation.♦ Thus far the process of annexation was little more than the restoration of an earlier state of things. For all these lands, except Poitou, had formed part of the old French duchy. ♦Territories kept by the English kings.♦ The Kings of England still kept the duchy of Aquitaine with Gascony. ♦The Norman Islands.♦ They kept also the insular Normandy, the Norman islands which have ever since remained distinct states attached to the English crown. ♦Aquitaine.♦ Aquitaine was now no longer part of the continental dominions of a prince who was equally at home on both sides of the Channel. It was now a remote dependency of the insular kingdom, a dependency whose great cities clave to the English connexion, while its geographical position and the feelings of its feudal nobility tended to draw it towards France.
♦Sudden greatness of France.♦
The result of this great and sudden acquisition of territory was to make the King of the French incomparably greater on Gaulish ground than any of his own vassals. France had now a large sea-board on the Channel and a small sea-board on the Ocean. And now another chain of events incorporated a large territory with which the crown had hitherto stood in no practical relation, and which gave the kingdom a third sea-board on the Mediterranean.
♦Fiefs of Aragon in Southern Gaul.♦
While north-western and south-western Gaul were united in the hands of an insular king, the king of a peninsular kingdom became only less powerful in south-eastern Gaul. ♦Counts of Toulouse.♦ Hitherto the greatest princes in this region had been the counts of Toulouse, who, besides their fiefs of the French crown, had also possessions in the Burgundian kingdom beyond the Rhone. But during the latter part of the eleventh century and the beginning of the twelfth, the Counts of Barcelona, and the kings of Aragon who succeeded them, acquired by various means a number of Tolosan fiefs, both French and Imperial. Carcassonne, Albi, and Nîmes were all under the lordship of the Aragonese crown. ♦The Albigensian War. 1207-1229.♦ The Albigensian war seemed at first likely to lead to the establishment of the house of Montfort as the chief power of Southern Gaul. ♦Simon of Montfort at Toulouse.♦ But the struggle ended in a vast increase of the power of the French crown, at the expense alike of the house of Toulouse and of the house of Aragon. ♦Settlement of Meaux.♦ The dominions of the Count of Toulouse were divided. ♦Annexation of Narbonne, 1229;♦ A number of fiefs, Beziers, Narbonne, Nîmes, Albi, and some other districts, were at once annexed to the crown. ♦of Toulouse, 1270.♦ The capital itself and its county passed to the crown fifty years later. By a settlement with Aragon, the domains of the French king were increased, while the French kingdom itself was nominally cut short. ♦Roussillon and Barcelona released from homage. 1258.♦ Two of the Aragonese fiefs, the counties of Roussillon and Barcelona, were relieved from even nominal homage. The name of Toulouse, except as the name of the city itself, now passed away, and the new acquisitions of France came in the end to be known by the name of the tongue which was common to them with Aquitaine and Imperial Burgundy. ♦Province of Languedoc.♦ Under the name of Languedoc they became one of the greatest and most valuable provinces of the French kingdom.
The great growth of the crown during the reign of Saint Lewis was thus in the south; but he also extended his borders nearer home. ♦Purchase of Blois and Chartres. 1234.
Escheat of Perche. 1257.♦ He won back part of the old French duchy when he purchased the superiority of Blois and Chartres, to which Perche was afterwards added by escheat. ♦Annexation of Macon, 1239.♦ Further off, he added Macon to the crown, a possession which afterwards passed away to the House of Burgundy.
♦Southern advance of the Crown.♦
Thus, during the reigns of Philip Augustus and his grandson, the royal possessions had been enlarged by the annexations of two of the chief vassal states, two of the lay peerages, annexations which gave the French King a sea-board on two seas and which brought him into immediate connexion with the affairs of the Spanish peninsula. ♦Marriage of Philip the Fair, 1284, with the heiress of Champagne and Navarre.♦ Later in the thirteenth century, the marriage of Philip the Fair with the heiress of Champagne not only extinguished another peerage, but made the French kings for awhile actually Spanish sovereigns, and made France an immediate neighbour of the German kingdom. The county of Champagne had for two generations been united with the kingdom of Navarre. These dominions were held in right of their wives by three kings of France. ♦Separation of Navarre. 1328.
Union of Champagne, 1335; incorporation, 1361.♦ Then Navarre, though it passed to a French prince, was wholly separated from France, while Champagne was incorporated with the kingdom. This last annexation gave France a considerable frontier towards Germany, and especially brought the kingdom into the immediate neighbourhood of the Lotharingian bishoprics. These acquisitions, of Normandy and the states connected with it, of Toulouse and the rest of Languedoc, and now of Champagne, were the chief cases of incorporation of vassal states with the royal domain up to the middle of the fourteenth century. ♦Appanages.♦ The mere grants and recoveries of appanages hardly concern geography. We now turn to two great struggles which, in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Kings of France had to wage with two of their chief vassals who were also powerful foreign princes. In both cases, events which seemed likely to bring about the utter humiliation of France did in the end bring to it a large increase of territory.