Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

Philip carried Count Ferrand behind him in chains on his triumphal march to Paris, while all the churches along the way rang their bells, and the crowds poured forth to cheer their king and sing Te Deums.

‘The Battle of Bouvines was perhaps the most important engagement ever fought on French soil.’ So wrote a modern historian before the war of 1914.

In the days of Louis VII the Kings of France had stood dwarfed amid Dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine and Counts of Flanders and Anjou. Now the son of Louis had defeated an emperor, thrown one rebellious tenant-in-chief into a dungeon, and from another, the Angevin John, gained as the reward of his victory all the long-coveted provinces north of the Loire. Even the crown treasury, once so poor, was replete for the time with the revenues of the confiscated Norman and Angevin estates of English barons, who had been forbidden by their sovereign to do homage any more to a French overlord.

Philip Augustus had shown himself Philip ‘the Conqueror’; but he was something far greater—a king who, like Henry II of England, could build as well as destroy. During his reign the menace of the old feudal baronage was swept away, and the government received its permanent stamp as a servant of the monarchy.

In his dealing with the French Church Philip followed the traditions of Pepin the Short and Charlemagne, yet gratifying as were his numerous gifts to monasteries and convents, they were dovetailed into a scheme of combining the liberal patron with the firm master. That good relations between the king and clergy resulted was largely due to Philip’s policy of replacing bishops belonging to powerful families by men of humble origin accustomed to subservience. Also he would usually support the lesser clergy in their frequent quarrels with their ecclesiastical superiors, thus weakening the leaders while he won the affection of the rank and file.

Innocent III and France

Like John he came into collision with the iron will of Pope Innocent III, but on a purely moral question, his refusal to live with the Danish princess Ingeborg, to whom he had taken a violent and unaccountable dislike on his wedding-day. The bride was a girl of eighteen; she could speak no French, her husband’s bishops were afraid to uphold her cause whatever their secret opinions, but in appealing to the Pope for help she gained an unyielding champion.

In other chapters we shall see Innocent III as a politician and a persecutor of heretics: here he stands as the moral leader of Europe; and no estimate of his character and work would be fair that neglected this aspect. It was to Innocent’s political advantage to please the French king, whose help he needed to chastise the English John and to support a crusade against an outburst of heresy in Languedoc. Moreover, he had no armies to compel a king who accused his wife of witchcraft to recognize her as queen. Yet Innocent believed that Philip was in the wrong; and when the French king persuaded his bishops to divorce him and then promptly married again, papal letters proceeded to denounce the divorce as a farce and the new marriage as illegal.

‘Recall your lawful wife,’ wrote Innocent, ‘and then we will hear all that you can righteously urge. If you do not do this no power shall move us to right or left until justice be done.’ This letter was followed by threats of excommunication, and after some months by an interdict that reduced Philip to a promise of submission in return for a full inquiry into his case. The promise so grudgingly given remained but a promise, and it was not until 1213, nearly twenty years since he had so cruelly repudiated Ingeborg, that, driven by continual papal pressure and the critical state of his fortunes, Philip openly acknowledged the Danish princess as his wife and queen.

We have seen something of Philip’s dealings with his greater tenants-in-chief; but such achievements as the conquest of Normandy and Anjou and the victory of Bouvines were but the fruits of years of diplomacy, during which the royal power had permeated the land, like ether the atmosphere, almost unnoticed. In lending a sympathetic ear to the complaints of Richard and his brothers against their father, Philip was merely carrying out the policy we have noticed in his treatment of the Church.