LOUIS VI. (1081-1137), king of France, surnamed “the Fat,” was the son of Philip I. of France and Bertha of Holland. He was also surnamed the “Wide-awake” and “the Bruiser,” and lost none of his energy when he earned the nickname by which he is known in history. In 1098 Louis was made a knight, and about the same time was associated with his father in the government, which the growing infirmities of Philip left more and more to his son, in spite of the opposition of Bertrada, the queen, whose criminal union with Philip had brought the anathema of the church. From 1100 to 1108 Louis by his victorious wars on the English and brigands had secured the army on his side, while the court supported Bertrada. Unable to make headway against him in war she attempted to poison him, and contemporary chroniclers attributed to this poison the pallor of his face, which seems to have been in remarkable contrast to his stalwart, and later his corpulent figure. Louis’ reign is one of the most important in the history of France. He is little less than the second founder of the Capetian dynasty. When the feeble and incompetent Philip I. died (29th of July 1108) Louis was faced by feudal barons as powerful as himself, and ready to rise against him. He was forced to have himself hurriedly crowned at Orleans, supported by a handful of vassals and some ecclesiastics. As king he continued the policy he had followed during the previous eight years, of securing the roads leading to Paris by putting down feudal brigands and destroying their strongholds in the Île-de-France. The castle of the most notorious of these, Hugues du Puiset, was three times taken and burned by the king’s men, but Hugues was spared to go back each time to his robber life, until he died on a crusade. In the north, Thomas de Marle, son of Enguerrand de Coucy, carried on a career of rapine and murder for almost thirty years before the king succeeded in taking him prisoner (1130). Twenty-four years of continuous war finally rooted out the robber barons who lived on the plunder of the roads leading to Paris: the lords of Montlhéri, who commanded the roads to Orleans, Melun and the south, those of Montmorency near St Denis on the north (who had to restore what they had robbed the abbey of St Denis), those of Le Puiset toward the west, on the way to Chartres, and many others. Parallel with this consolidation of his power in the ancestral domains Louis met energetically the Anglo-Norman danger, warring with Henry I. of England for twenty-five years. After the victory of Tinchebray (1106) Louis supported the claims of William Clito, son of Robert, duke of Normandy, against Henry I. A ruthless war followed, in which Louis was at times reduced to the sorest straits. In 1119, at a council held at Reims under the presidency of Pope Calixtus II., the enemies were reconciled; but William Clito’s claims were not satisfied, and in 1123 war began again on a larger scale. Henry I. induced the emperor Henry V. to join in the attack upon France; and, his heir having been drowned in the loss of the “White Ship,” won the count of Anjou by marrying his only daughter Matilda to Geoffrey, the Angevin heir (1127). The invasion of Henry V. was met by something like a national army, which gathered under Louis at Reims. “For a few days at least, the lord of the Île-de-France was truly a king of France” (Luchaire). Suger proudly gives the list of barons who appeared. Henry V. came no farther than Metz. Royalty had won great prestige. Even Theobald, count of Chartres, the king’s greatest enemy, the soul of feudal coalitions, came with his contingent. Shortly afterwards (1126), Louis was able to overawe the great count of Aquitaine, William IX., and force his vassal, the count of Auvergne, to treat justly the bishop of Clermont. In Flanders Louis interfered upon the assassination of Charles the Good. He caused the barons to elect as their count in Arras the same William Clito who claimed Normandy, and who was closely bound to the king. For a while Louis had Flanders absolutely at his disposal, but he had hardly left William alone (1127) when his brutal oppression roused both towns and nobles, who declared that Louis had no right to interfere in Flanders. The death of William Clito, and a savage war with his own seneschal, prevented Louis from effectually resenting this attitude; but Thierry of Alsace, the new count, consented in 1128 to receive from Louis the investiture of all his French fiefs, and henceforth lived on good terms with him. In all his wars—those mentioned are but a part of them—Louis fought in person. Proud of his strength, reckless in the charge as on the march, plunging into swollen rivers, entering blazing castles, he gained the reputation of a national hero, the protector of the poor, the church, the peasants and the towns. The communal movement grew during his reign, and he encouraged it on the fiefs of his vassals in order to weaken them; but the title “Father of the Communes” by which he was known in history is not deserved, though he did grant some privileges to towns on his domains. Neither was Louis the author of the movement for the emancipation of the serfs, as was formerly claimed. His attitude toward the movement was like that of his predecessors and contemporaries, to favour emancipation when it promised greater chance of profit, greater scope for exploitation of the peasants; otherwise to oppose it. He was a great benefactor to the church, aided the new, reformed monastic congregations of Cîteau, Prémontré and Fontevrault, and chose his two chief ministers from the clergy. Étienne de Garlande, whom Louis raised from obscurity to be archdeacon of Notre Dame at Paris, chancellor and seneschal of France, was all-powerful with the king from 1108 to 1127. His relatives monopolized the highest offices of the state. But the queen Adelaide became his enemy; both Ivo of Chartres and St Bernard bitterly attacked him; and the king suddenly stripped him of all his offices and honours. Joining the rebellious barons, Étienne then led a bitter war against the king for three years. When Louis had reduced him to terms he pardoned him and restored him to the chancellorship (1132), but not to his old power. Suger (q.v.), administrator of St Denis, enters the scene toward the close of this reign, but his great work belongs to the next. Louis VI. died on the 1st of August 1137, just a few days after his son, Louis the Young, had set out for the far south-west, the Aquitaine which had been won by the marriage with Eleanor. His wife was Adelaide, or Alice, daughter of Humbert II., count of Savoy, by whom he had seven sons and a daughter.
See A. Luchaire, Louis le Gros, annales de sa vie et son règne (1890), and the same writer’s volume, Les Premiers Capétiens, in E. Lavisse’s Histoire de France.
(J. T. S.*)
LOUIS VII. (c. 1121-1180), king of France, son of Louis VI. the Fat, was associated with his father and anointed by Innocent II. in 1131. In 1137 he succeeded his father, and in the same year married at Bordeaux Eleanor, heiress of William II., duke of Aquitaine. In the first part of his reign he was vigorous and jealous of his prerogatives, but after his crusade his religiosity developed to such an extent as to make him utterly inefficient. His accession was marked by no disturbances, save the risings of the burgesses of Orleans and of Poitiers, who wished to organize communes. But soon he came into violent conflict with Pope Innocent II. The archbishopric of Bourges became vacant, and the king supported as candidate the chancellor Cadurc, against the pope’s nominee Pierre de la Châtre, swearing upon relics that so long as he lived Pierre should never enter Bourges. This brought the interdict upon the king’s lands. At the same time he became involved in a war with Theobald, count of Champagne, by permitting Rodolphe (Raoul), count of Vermandois and seneschal of France, to repudiate his wife, Theobald’s niece, and to marry Petronille of Aquitaine, sister of the queen of France. The war, which lasted two years (1142-44), was marked by the occupation of Champagne by the royal army and the capture of Vitry, where many persons perished in the burning of the church. Geoffrey the Handsome, count of Anjou, by his conquest of Normandy threatened the royal domains, and Louis VII. by a clever manœuvre threw his army on the Norman frontier and gained Gisors, one of the keys of Normandy. At his court which met in Bourges Louis declared on Christmas Day 1145 his intention of going on a crusade. St Bernard assured its popularity by his preaching at Vézelay (Easter 1146), and Louis set out from Metz in June 1147, on the overland route to Syria. The expedition was disastrous, and he regained France in 1149, overcome by the humiliation of the crusade. In the rest of his reign he showed much feebleness and poor judgment. He committed a grave political blunder in causing a council at Beaugency (on the 21st of March 1152) to annul his marriage with Eleanor of Aquitaine, under pretext of kinship, but really owing to violent quarrels during the crusade. Eleanor married Henry II. of England in the following May, and brought him the duchy of Aquitaine. Louis VII. led a half-hearted war against Henry for having married without the authorization of his suzerain; but in August 1154 gave up his rights over Aquitaine, and contented himself with an indemnity. In 1154 Louis married Constance, daughter of the king of Castile, and their daughter Marguerite he affianced imprudently by the treaty of Gisors (1158) to Henry, eldest son of the king of England, promising as dowry the Vexin and Gisors. Five weeks after the death of Constance, on the 4th of October 1160, Louis VII. married Adèle of Champagne, and Henry II. to counterbalance the aid this would give the king of France, had the marriage of their infant children celebrated at once. Louis VII. gave little sign of understanding the danger of the growing Angevin power, though in 1159 he made an expedition in the south to aid Raymond V., count of Toulouse, who had been attacked by Henry II. At the same time the emperor Frederick I. in the east was making good the imperial claims on Arles. When the schism broke out, Louis took the part of the pope Alexander III., the enemy of Frederick, and after two comedy-like failures of Frederick to meet Louis VII. at Saint Jean de Losne (on the 29th of August and the 22nd of September 1162), Louis definitely gave himself up to the cause of Alexander, who lived at Sens from 1163 to 1165. Alexander gave the king, in return for his loyal support, the golden rose. Louis VII. received Thomas Becket and tried to reconcile him with King Henry II. He supported Henry’s rebellious sons, but acted slowly and feebly, and so contributed largely to the break up of the coalition (1173-1174). Finally in 1177 the pope intervened to bring the two kings to terms at Vitry. By his third wife, Adèle, Louis had an heir, the future Philip Augustus, born on the 21st of August 1165. He had him crowned at Reims in 1179, but, already stricken with paralysis, he himself was not able to be present at the ceremony, and died on the 18th of September 1180. His reign from the point of view of royal territory and military power, was a period of retrogression. Yet the royal authority had made progress in the parts of France distant from the royal domains. More direct and more frequent connexion was made with distant feudatories, a result largely due to the alliance of the clergy with the crown. Louis thus reaped the reward for services rendered the church during the least successful portion of his reign.
See R. Hirsch, Studien zur Geschichte König Ludwigs VII. von Frankreich (1892); A. Cartellieri, Philipp II. August von Frankreich bis zum Tode seines Vaters, 1165-1180 (1891); and A. Luchaire in E. Lavisse’s Histoire de France, tome iii. 1st part, pp. 1-81.
(J. T. S.*)
LOUIS VIII. (1187-1226), king of France, eldest son of Philip Augustus and of Isabella of Hainaut, was born in Paris on the 5th of September 1187. Louis was short, thin, pale-faced, with studious tastes, cold and placid temper, sober and chaste in his life. He left the reputation of a saint, but was also a warrior prince. In 1213 he led the campaign against Ferrand, count of Flanders; in 1214, while Philip Augustus was winning the victory of Bouvines, he held John of England in check, and was victorious at La Roche-aux-Moines. In the autumn of 1215 Louis received from a group of English barons, headed by Geoffrey de Mandeville, a request to “pluck them out of the hand of this tyrant” (John). Some 7000 French knights were sent over to England during the winter and two more contingents followed, but it was only after twenty-four English hostages had arrived in Paris that Louis himself prepared to invade England. The expedition was forbidden by the papal legate, but Louis set out from Calais on the 20th and landed at Stonor on the 22nd of May 1216. In three months he had obtained a strong foothold in eastern England, and in the end of July he laid siege to Dover, while part of his army besieged Windsor with a view to securing the safety of London. The pretexts on which he claimed the English crown were set down in a memorandum drawn up by French lawyers in 1215. These claims—that John had forfeited the crown by the murder of his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, and that the English barons had the right to dispose of the vacant throne—lost their plausibility on the death of King John and the accession of his infant son as Henry III. in October 1216. The papal legate, Gualo, who had forbidden the enterprise, had arrived in England at the same time as Louis. He excommunicated the French troops and the English rebels, and Henry III. found a valiant defender in William Marshal, earl of Pembroke. After the “Fair of Lincoln,” in which his army was defeated, Louis was compelled to resign his pretensions, though by a secret article of the treaty of Lambeth (September 1217) he secured a small war indemnity. Louis had assisted Simon de Montfort in his war against the Albigenses in 1215, and after his return to France he again joined the crusade. With Simon’s son and successor, Amauri de Montfort, he directed the brutal massacre which followed the capture of Marmande. Philip II., suspicious of his son until the close of his life, took precautions to assure his obedience, narrowly watched his administration in Artois, which Louis held from his mother Isabella, and, contrary to the custom of the kings of France, did not associate his son with him by having him crowned. Philip Augustus dying on the 14th of July 1223, Louis VIII. was anointed at Reims on the 6th of August following. He surrounded himself with councillors whom his father had chosen and formed, and continued his father’s policy. His reign was taken up with two great designs: to destroy the power of the Plantagenets, and to conquer the heretical south of France. An expedition conquered Poitou and Saintonge (1224); in 1226 he led the crusade against the Albigenses in the south, forced Avignon to capitulate and received the submission of Languedoc. While passing the Auvergne on his return to Paris, he was stricken with dysentery, and died at Montpensier on the 8th of November 1226. His reign, short as it was, brought gains both to the royal domains and to the power of the crown over the feudal lords. He had married in 1200 Blanche of Castile, daughter of Alphonso IX. of Castile and granddaughter of Henry II. of England, who bore him twelve children; his eldest surviving son was his successor, Louis IX.