Philip Augustus and the French Realm

It has long been recognized that the reign of Philip Augustus was a critical turning point in the fortunes of the medieval French monarchy. Under his rule, the royal domain increased dramatically, royal revenue was augmented to an unprecedented degree, and the balance

of power between the king and the barons of the realm tipped decisively, and irreversibly, in favor of the monarchy. Philip Augustus's success is all the more notable in light of the condition of Capetian kingship at the beginning of his rule. When in 1179, at the age of fourteen, Philip assumed the governance of the realm from his ailing father, Louis VII, Capetian power scarcely matched that of the great barons, whose counties ringed the royal domain. Weak, with few administrative organs and even fewer servants, the king controlled only a small area of scattered lands, for the most part located within the Seine basin in the territory known as the Île-de-France.

To the west of the royal domain lay the powerful duchy of Normandy, whose ruler, since 1066 also the king of England, disposed of resources far greater than any the king of France could muster. Philip Augustus's grandfather, Louis VI, had engaged in continuous but futile warfare against this threatening neighbor and in 1119, after the battle of Brémule, had been forced to endure the humiliation of receiving back his charger, saddle, and bridle, lost in war, as a gift from Henry I, who kept for himself the French battle-standard as a souvenir of victory.^[19] To the east and south of the royal domain—indeed, virtually encircling it—lay the extensive lands of the house of Champagne-Blois; and to the north loomed the rich and powerful county of Flanders, next to Normandy the wealthiest and best organized principality in western Europe at the end of the twelfth century. The counts of Champagne and Flanders, vassals of the French king with respect to their comital tenures, also held lands on their eastern frontiers from the German emperor, a fact that only complicated already difficult relations with their French overlord.^[20] Although Louis VI and Louis VII had pacified the royal domain, making it possible for a French king finally to travel between Paris and Orleans without fear of violent attack,^[21] the resources that the domain returned to the king, whether in revenue or military service, constituted but a fraction of those routinely available to the king's rivals.^[22]

Despite the legacy of a weak and poorly administered domain, however, Philip Augustus was determined from the beginning to assert royal authority and impose his will upon his highly independent and often recalcitrant vassals. The tenacity of purpose and political skill with which he pursued this goal led contemporary chroniclers, looking back at the striking accomplishments of his reign, to attribute to Philip an early and unwavering commitment to defeat his enemies and extend his power. Thus Gerald of Wales reports that in 1174, when not quite ten years old, Philip was taken by his father Louis VII to visit

Henry II at his newly constructed castle of Gisors. As the assembled company of lords extolled the strength and richness of the Plantagenet fortress, the child became angry and burst forth, saying that he wished that the castle were even stronger and made of gold, silver, and diamonds. Asked why, Philip retorted: "The more precious the materials of the castle, the more pleasure I will have in possessing it when it shall fall into my hands."^[23]

Perhaps the most striking image of Philip's refusal to be constrained by vassals whom he considered his legal subordinates, however inadequate his own resources, derives from the account of a dream interpolated into Rigord's Gesta Philippi Augusti . Before Philip was even born, his father, who had waited many years for the birth of a son, saw in a vision an image of the young prince holding out a golden chalice filled with human blood, which he offered to his vassals, who drank from it (et omnes in eo bibebant ).^[24] The fields of France would indeed be drenched in the blood of Philip's vassals before the king had succeeded in making himself master of the realm.

Few Capetian kings pursued power as ruthlessly or unscrupulously as Philip.^[25] Although careful to provide a legal basis for the major acquisitions of his reign, Philip often did not hesitate to break treaties and conventions when it suited him; to compel vassals against their will, sometimes even without their knowledge, to stand surety for their compatriots (both techniques used with notable success in Philip's struggles with the counts of Flanders); and, in general, to employ the full arsenal of available feudal rights to insinuate the monarchy's presence wherever possible throughout the kingdom. Lacking men and money, Philip used guile, patience, and persistence in asserting royal authority over the great barons. Payon Gastinel, a canon of Saint-Martin of Tours, who knew the king well, calls him "expert in the art of intrigue" (in machinis peritissimus ) and "stingy to his enemies" (inimicis avarus ), among whom he sowed discord that he might all the more easily "repress the malignity of the great men of the kingdom" (malignos regni primates opprimens eorumque discordias volens ).^[26]

Philip sought to exercise the royal prerogatives that had always adhered to the crown, but which earlier Capetian kings had enforced only with great difficulty, if at all. To that end, he began the slow, painstaking process of creating a machinery of government that would be responsive to the king's will and would enable him to govern the realm effectively. Beginning with the creation of the baillis , salaried royal officers owing everything to the king, Philip Augustus inaugu-

rated a field administration that would eventually assume responsibility for the financial and judicial functions of the king on the local level. Although the full impact of the baillis on local administration was not felt until after Philip's reign, the growth in royal administration had made sufficient progress that the power of the French king in the thirteenth century became preponderant, transforming irreversibly the traditional balance of authority and autonomy between monarchy and aristocracy.

Of the extensive bureaucratic and judicial innovations of Philip Augustus's reign, a number are particularly relevant here because of their broad implications for baronial independence. Most immediately obvious to contemporary chroniclers was a change in the composition of the royal court. It was the king's practice, the canon of Saint-Martin of Tours reported, to seek advice from "lesser men" (minorum consilio utens ).^[27] The Anonymous of Béhune, in his Chronique des rois de France , similarly scoffed at the low-born men and administrative arrivistes from whom the king routinely took counsel, men whom, without naming, he characterizes as "un gras chevalier," "un petit chevalier," and another "de basse gens,"^[28] who were supplanting the barons and prelates in the royal council.

What these chroniclers noticed was a striking change in the composition of the central curia taking place under Philip Augustus. The Capetian curia, like the household government of the Carolingians from whom it was inherited, had originally consisted of the four standard household officers plus a large and diffuse body of royal familiares , who lived at the palace and who formed the royal entourage. These palatini traveled with the king, served his needs, filled his embassies, and acted as his counselors. ^[29] Under Louis VII, the practice of taking counsel from royal advisors became more formal with the emergence of a royal conseil , which increasingly functioned as an institutional forum in which the king could consult such consiliari as he deemed fit.^[30] After the Second Crusade, the men whom Louis VII called to his conseil included not only the knights and clerks of his household, but also the great men of the realm, the proceres and optimates who, as royal vassals, were bound by the conditions of their feudal tenure to offer their lord consilium as well as military aid.

This socially complex composition of the royal conseil , including both palatini and optimates , remained Capetian practice until Philip Augustus's return from the Third Crusade in 1191. After that date, however, the number and eminence of Philip's consiliari declined consistently. The last great barons to appear in the conseil by virtue of

their feudal tenure had been men like counts Philippe of Flanders and Thibaut of Blois, both of whom died while accompanying Philip on the Third Crusade.^[31] In place of the barons, Philip increasingly relied on a restricted number of trusted counselors who formed part of the incipient "service aristocracy" so distasteful to the chroniclers. These men were creatures of the king, recruited by Philip while still young, generally from among the lesser nobility, who owed their rise to influence and whatever wealth they accumulated along the way to royal favor.

According to the anonymous author of the Chronique des rois de France , writing around 1213, Philip confided principally in three men—Walter the Chamberlain, Bartélemy of Roye, and Guerin of Senlis—who, he claimed, were with the king "more continually than any other and aided him with counsel and chevalerie and in any way that they could. . .. [Because] in these three in whom he trusted the most, the king was accustomed to take his counsel and open his heart concerning what he wished to do."^[32] Although it is unlikely that Philip restricted his search for advice to only three counselors, the exclusion of the magnates from the royal conseil and Philip's tendency to rely on lesser knights and clerks of the king—the milites et clerici regis —to fill the council and to execute royal orders was symptomatic of a new orientation in Capetian government. No longer was royal government the product of a collaborative effort between the king and proceres of the realm, as the Carolingians and early Capetians had envisaged it. Rather, beginning with Philip Augustus, the king based his strength and administrative efficiency on the maintenance of a corps of paid royal servitors responsive to the royal will and personally beholden to the king for advancement. Royal government now possessed the instruments with which to subdue the magnates rather than cooperate with them.

At the same time as Philip Augustus was restricting baronial participation in the royal conseil , he sought to extend royal jurisdiction over his vassals and rear-vassals. In 1209, for example, he issued an ordinance respecting the inheritance of fiefs throughout the kingdom, which decreed that whenever a fief was divided, in whatever fashion, all new heirs were to hold their tenures as direct vassals of the original lord, rather than through an intermediary.^[33] Effective primarily within the domain itself, the ordinance of 1209 nonetheless signaled Philip's desire to affirm his feudal suzerainty and to insist on the performance of marks of subordination such as homage, owed him in his

capacity as feudal overlord. Indeed, Bournazel and Poly have argued that not until the reign of Philip Augustus did the French monarchy become feudal in the strict sense of the term, that is, take the form of a fixed, hierarchical ranking of fiefs, each category of which lay within the mouvance , or jurisdiction, of the category immediately above it.^[34] Over this structure the king presided, alone free of feudal encumbrances, for, as Philip declared in 1213: "Our predecessors the kings of France were wont to do homage to no one."^[35] "Le roi ne tient de nului"—the king receives but cannot himself perform homage;^[36] he surmounts but is not part of the feudal order constituted by the totality of fiefs, each dependent one upon the other, which gives the realm its political coherence. This image of the kingdom as an ordered, hierarchical structure of fiefs was precisely that inscribed in the royal registers by the chancery clerks who drew up the feudal inventories (known now as the Scripta de feodis ), which for the first time projected a mental map of the territories subject to royal authority both within and beyond the domain.^[37]

Philip did not confine himself, moreover, to providing a theoretical basis for feudal suzerainty. He exploited the full panoply of rights with which his feudal overlordship endowed him—whether of wardship, marriage, or relief—to augment royal revenues and to expand royal jurisdiction. The citation of King John to the French court in response to the appeal of Hugh of Lusignan in 1202, which laid the legal basis for the conquest of Angevin territories after John failed to answer the royal summons and was adjudged to have defaulted, is the most famous case of Philip's exercise of an expanded feudal jurisdiction over the great barons of the realm.^[38] It is not, however, the only one.

Moreover, Philip's ability to enforce the judgment of his court was strikingly new. In 1154, when Eleanor of Aquitaine married Henry Plantagenet, Louis VII had cited him to court for violating a vassal's obligation to consult his lord upon contracting a marriage, and when Henry failed to appear, Louis VII declared his lands confiscate. The war that ensued led to Louis's defeat at the hands of his vassal and ultimately to the humiliating Treaty of Gisors of 1158. By contrast, with the acquisition of the Angevin lands of Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and Poitou, realized in execution of the penalty of confiscation for default of law against John, Philip successfully imposed the sentence of his court on a rebellious vassal. That Philip's judgment against John in 1202 led ultimately to the permanent dispossession of

his fiefs vindicated the king's claim to feudal jurisdiction beyond the royal domain and served notice that he would no longer tolerate disobedience.

Excluded from central government and made to submit to royal jurisdiction, the French aristocracy was threatened in even such customarily privileged realms as participation in warfare. The use of mercenary armies increased markedly in France during the reign of Philip Augustus, who initially employed the Brabanons, and then military adventurers like Cadoc.^[39] ç After 1181 the chroniclers no longer mention Brabançons as part of French armies, but the general term cottereaux (cotarelli ) appears to indicate the king's use of paid, non-knightly forces.^[40] Such bands of professional combatants, of low birth and fighting with weapons considered unworthy of a knight, had been used with increasing frequency since the middle of the twelfth century by English kings,^[41] but they had not been resorted to by the Capetians, whose financial reserves before Philip Augustus were inadequate to support large paid armies.^[42] Even during Philip's rule, the Capetians relied less on mercenary forces than did the Angevins, whose propensity to expend large sums on military ventures continued to outstrip that of their feudal overlords.

If not strictly mercenary, Philip's army nonetheless contained relatively few knights who served by virtue of their obligation to provide feudal service. According to the accounts of 1202-1203, some 259 knights figured among Philip's troops, which numbered between 2,300 and 2,600 fighters.^[43] To a large extent, the royal army was composed of bannerets and lesser knights, whose service was paid from the royal treasury, and of sergents , either on foot or mounted. These sergents à cheval , although fighting on horseback in the style of knights, formed a non-knightly contingent recruited in all probability both from the lowest ranks of the nobility—those too poor to possess a fief owing military service (according to Audouin)—or from among commoners (according to Duby), including bourgeois from the cities now armed as knights (armati ut milites ).^[44] Guillaume le Breton, describing in the Philippide the sergents à cheval from Soissons who fought at Bouvines, calls them "sons of the people" (alumni plebis ).^[45] Their appearance among the feudal host during the reign of Philip Augustus signaled the end of the aristocracy's monopoly over war and its right to fight in a distinctively noble manner.

To make matters worse, competition on the battlefield was accompanied by economic competition at home. The late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries witnessed rapid economic change, which worked,

in both the short and the long term, to the detriment of Europe's seigneurial classes.^[46] Evidence of a growing pattern of economic impoverishment on the part of the French aristocracy in this period is widespread. Although it is likely that the new monetary economy coming into full flower at the beginning of the thirteenth century brought greater revenues to the nobility than their ancestors had enjoyed in the form of profits from tithes, mills, ovens, tailles , and péages , it is also true that the expenses both of seigneurial exploitation and of war had risen dramatically.^[47] To take but one example: the price of a destrier or medieval warhorse, which in peacetime cost between eight and ten livres tournois, during periods of war—which is to say, for most of the first two decades of the thirteenth century—rose to four times that amount, ranging as high as forty livres tournois.^[48] Moreover, in the regions most deeply penetrated by the new economy, lords no longer enjoyed absolute monopolies over mills (which, thanks to improved techniques, were a significant source of augmented income), some of which now belonged to the bourgeois of the towns or to peasant communities, as did other sources of seigneurial income.^[49] Profits from mounting grain prices, which benefited lords who continued to cultivate their domains directly, were often offset by increases in the costs of seigneurial exploitation, as the prices for tools, salaries, recordkeeping materials, and the business of "doing justice" rose precipitously in the thirteenth century.^[50] In addition, improvements in military technology heightened the expense of serving as a knight, and feudal "aids" for ransom, voyages to the East and related Crusade expenses, reliefs, and other financial burdens imposed by feudal rulers similarly expanded.^[51]

Doubtless, however, the principal cause of aristocratic economic embarrassment in this period lay neither in the rising costs associated with cultivation nor in a decline in landed income. The problem, rather, was an increase in the expenses entailed by the social requirements of living "nobly."^[52] Enormous outlays for food, lodgings, and especially a growing habit of luxury in dress put unaccustomed strains on noble purses. Noblewomen developed a taste for green surcots , tunics of vermilion silk, dresses of camlet or tiretaine. Their spouses and suitors began to adorn themselves in cloaks lined with rabbit skins, capes, and high boots.^[53] The greater the social challenge to the old nobility from the rising wealth of the urban bourgeoisie, the more necessary it became for the nobility visually to distinguish itself through the adoption of a distinctive mode of dress, comportment, and manners. It is hardly accidental that contemporary French romances lavish

such exquisite concern on the details of aristocratic accoutrements and appearance or that the royal virtue most often extolled in aristocratic literature is that of largesse to a warrior class for whom extravagance was rapidly becoming a form of social definition.

To meet the growing costs of a decorated life, the nobility resorted to borrowing. Toward the end of the twelfth century, there is accumulating evidence of aristocratic indebtedness, achieving levels of debt that, after 1200, could be made good only by the sale of homages and property. Sales of lands and manors, rights to tolls and mills, and other sources of economic remuneration generated immediate cash for indebted nobles, but also sapped the economic basis of the noble family's wealth, authority, and social prestige by diminishing the size of its landed patrimony and the rights of governance attached to it. Since land prices remained relatively stable throughout the thirteenth century—a phenomenon attributable to the abundance of available land on the market^[54] —such measures in any case provided only limited and temporary relief and risked restricting the family's ability to function in the future. Around 1210, numerous sales of aristocratic properties in northern France are noticeable; among powerful lords like the counts of Ponthieu, the counts of Saint-Pol, and the castellans of Bapaume and Saint-Omer, it is possible to trace sales of important landed possessions to churches through successive contracts representing several generations of the family.^[55]

Although the original beneficiaries of such sales may have been churches, considerable territories also went to non-nobles who, in assuming the nobility's titles to land, threatened to acquire the social entitlements that for centuries had marked the barriers dividing noble from non-noble in medieval society. It was to protect themselves against this threat of social decline and to draw indelibly a line between those who, however impoverished, were entitled to access to the nobility by virtue of birth and those who were not that the French aristocracy began to bestow the title of esquire ("armiger," or "ecuyer" in northern France) upon male members of a family whose profligacy or economic ill fortune had deprived them of the means necessary to achieve knighthood and who, therefore, had abandoned all hopes of being dubbed. Without functional significance, the title of esquire expressed the social quality of the man whose blood gave him the right to noble status but whose financial resources were inadequate for its maintenance. As Duby has remarked, "Its adoption and diffusion on the eve of the thirteenth century marks more clearly than anything that from then on the aristocracy saw itself as a nobility, a

caste closed to all who could not claim good breeding."^[56] Threatened from below by the villein upstart who profited from the increased prosperity of the age to raise himself to a position of economic equality with the knight; threatened from within by growing indebtedness, which forced nobles to sell lands and homages; and threatened most of all from above by the rising power of the monarchy with its demand for support and obedience, the French aristocracy responded by closing its ranks, by constituting itself as an ordo governed by common juridical rules, accepted manners, and a shared knightly culture.

This shared culture was forged essentially by the diffusion among all members of the aristocracy of the high ideals of chivalry and courtoisie . For both high and lesser aristocrats, chivalric ideology functioned as a class code, drawing ever more firmly the lines separating those with claims to nobility from all other manner of men. In the face of the twin threat posed by a rapidly developing monetary economy and a strong centralized state, each of which favored the rise to prominence of non-noble segments of medieval society, the French aristocracy fell back on an essentially cultural model of social superiority through which it sought to assert its continued prestige and centrality.