TWO

A Golden Age: Abelard to Philippe-Auguste

’Tis sure the hardest science to forget! How shall I lose the sin, yet keep the sense, And love th’ offender, yet detest th’ offence?

—Eloisa to Abelard, Alexander Pope

IN THIS EARLY GOLDEN AGE of France there was played out one of history’s great love stories, an intense personal tragedy— from which there emerged a new word in the French vocabulary, Abélardiser—the story of Héloïse and Abelard. Both were true products of the twelfth century; both, had they lived a century later, would in all probability have ended at the stake. Born around 1079, Abelard is one of those rare philosophers remembered by posterity, mistakenly, more for his life than for his thinking. The poignancy of his love affair with the incomparable Héloïse, handed down through the generations from Jean de Meung’s Roman de la Rose to Diana Rigg (nude on stage for the first time in British theatre history) tends to obscure the fact that he was the greatest teacher of his age—as well as the inspiration and founder of the university that became the Sorbonne.

Son of a minor noble and from near Nantes, Abelard faced being disinherited by his knight father so as to pursue the studious life, but wandered from one school to another until he was drawn to the Cathedral School of Paris by the fame of the much-respected William of Champeaux (1070–1122).⁶ Here he shocked his fellows by presuming to question the principles of his teacher. This scholarly arrogance predicated a controversial career. Finally, in 1117, he came to lodge in the house of one Canon Fulbert, as tutor to Fulbert’s teenage niece, Héloïse—she aged seventeen, he now thirty-nine.

The spiral of passion and tragedy began: Abelard, handsome, brilliant and articulate, versed in poetry and music, and self-assured to excess, must surely have been a risky choice as a tutor. Today’s received view is that, a quarrelsome wencher, he may have been guilty of rape, or at least of harassment. Héloïse (already a young woman of considerable learning, and who always comes across as by far the greater human being of the two) would certainly have been the first to refute it. But Abelard was not discreet, and—in his passion—neglected his students. Héloïse had a baby, given the egregious name of Astralabe.

Despite their marrying, her uncle Fulbert—outraged by this slight on his house, and possibly with a jealous passion for his niece—sought a hideous vengeance on Abelard. In the dark of night, treacherously he had Abelard castrated. The men responsible were subsequently blinded in punishment—in many ways a worse fate, in that the blind, receiving no charity, would usually be condemned to a protracted death by starvation.

HÉLOÏSE, DISTRAUGHT, TOOK THE VEIL. Bitterly, but futilely, in her letters she would incessantly lament: “I am still young and full of life; I love you more than ever and suffer bitterly from living a life for which I have no vocation . . .” Abelard, in the fury of his impotent misery, would reply, with brutality: “let us not call it love but concupiscence. In you I cloyed a wretched appetite, which was all I really loved.”

Her penance was done, clearly, for the sake of Abelard—not for God; “People who call me chaste do not know what a hypocrite I am.”¹ Nevertheless, as Abbess she was accorded the highest respect, and papal protection; while her religious house, the Paraclete, grew to become one of the most distinguished in France.

FOREVER TORMENTED by what he had suffered, Abelard thrashed around in his misery, like John Donne, mutatis mutandis, abandoning the pleasures of the flesh that had been forcibly removed from him for the total glorification of God (which he pressed upon a reluctant Héloïse). In contrast to Héloïse, Abelard at once accepted, unreservedly, his disaster as due punishment requiring total expiation. Through impotence Abelard flowered mightily in intellectual output—albeit in unorthodox thinking. He began by becoming a monk at Saint-Denis, though he swiftly fell into disfavour with the all-powerful Abbot Suger; as abbot in Brittany, the coarse and ungodly bawdiness of the monks made him miserable. In 1121, he was condemned for heresy for his Theologia. Around 1133, he returned to Paris as master at Mont Sainte-Geneviève. It was here that he began the most brilliant phase of his life as a teacher. Seven years later he was again accused of heresy by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux,⁷ and he died at Saint-Marcel while on his way to make a personal appeal in Rome to Pope Innocent II. During his last years, Abelard would—supposedly—sit in reverie every day with his eyes turned in the direction of the Paraclete, and Héloïse.

After “forty years of the severest penance, with little faith in its religious efficacy,” Héloïse died at the age of sixty-three, outliving Abelard by two decades.

The two were laid in the same coffin; legend has it that, as Abelard’s tomb was opened, he raised his arms to receive her and closed them fast about her. There they remained together for over two centuries, until their remains were transferred and separated once more—by a prudish nun.

In 1792, revolutionary busybodies reinterred them in a single coffin, but with a lead partition between them. Finally, in a romantically inclined nineteenth-century France, the two lovers were reunited at fashionable Père Lachaise Cemetery under a Gothic canopy of stone, side by side, their hands raised in prayer.

ABELARD WAS LIVING in an era when Plato and Aristotle were just being rediscovered, and his intellectual fame rests on his introduction of logic and rationalism into theology, dispelling some of the mystical tenets that had held sway. By employing dialectics as a means to this end, Abelard’s methods made him as controversial as the body of his thought, for it was unheard of for a teacher to encourage his students to argue with him: “by doubting we come to inquiry, and by inquiring we pursue the truth”² was his famous credo. It stood sharply at odds with the accepted norm of the times, as characterised in the credo of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the illustrious Saint Anselm of Bec: “nor do I seek to know that I believe, but I believe that I know.”

While Abelard’s dialectics greatly endeared him to his students, and to Saint Thomas Aquinas a century later, it further alienated rigid conservatives like his enemy, Saint Bernard, who was not unknown to flog his students. His Theology, snorted Saint Bernard, was not “the-ology” but “stupid-ology;” “God’s secrets,” he claimed, were “eviscerated” by Abelard.

Abelard’s Sic et Non,⁸ in which he presented hundreds of apparently contradictory statements by Church elders for evaluation by his “scholars,” became a seminal work; while his Dialectica raised, challengingly, the whole issue of free will. If God, in his omniscience, asked Abelard, knows that we are going to perform a given act, is it not preordained that we perform it, in which case how can the act be free ? Abelard’s answer was that God’s foreknowledge of our actions carried “no implication that we are not free to avoid performing them.” This smacked of apostasy—and was sheer anathema to Saint Bernard, who detected “a very source of heresy,” predicting that the Church would be shaken when students attempted to form an opinion. In 1121, the Synod of Soissons found Abelard guilty of heresy and condemned him to burn his own book, Theologia; he was perhaps fortunate that this was the only conflagration.

Acting under such pressures, Abelard and his small band of “scholars” migrated from the Île de la Cité to the Left Bank, to an area ever since known as the Latin Quarter—because of the prevalence of scholarly Latin spoken there. From then on it came to be said that Paris “learned to think” on the Left Bank.

In an age where the high costs of manuscripts and time involved in copying them tediously by hand made books scarce items, the capabilities of a teacher were of first importance. Abelard’s charm and his appeal as the continent’s best lecturer were immense. Students came from all over France, and Europe, just for the privilege of sitting at the feet of this brilliant but unhappy man. Through Abelard, the twelfth century became the age of dialectics; and, through the focal point his teaching provided, inevitably Paris’ first university grew around it. Though modelling itself on northern Italy’s Bologna, Europe’s oldest university, during the reign of Philippe-Auguste this forerunner of the Sorbonne started off life as a guild⁹—or, in effect, and which was to be of considerable consequence in the later, stormy eras of the Sorbonne such as 1968—a trade union.

AMIDST THE CONSTRUCTION of Notre-Dame and the birth of a university, and for all the administrative reforms Suger achieved in Paris, in many aspects France’s capital remained a collection of villages, with pigs roaming muddy streets. One such “diabolic boar” caused the death of Louis’ first-born heir, Prince Philippe, when his horse shied and threw him near Saint-Gervais. Louis then had his second son crowned— nicknamed “Louis the Young” because he was only eleven at the time —and in that great political coup married him to Eleanor of Aquitaine. But immediately on his return from Bordeaux, Louis VI was stricken with dysentery, dying in his Palais Cité—on a carpet over which he supposedly had had ashes laid in the form of a cross. He was only fiftysix, but his final achievement had profoundly affected the destiny of France.

In 1137, just as the English Plantagenets were wreaking their revenge for the Norman invasion on the mainland of France, Louis VII, “the Young,” took over the throne of France, beginning a reign of forty-three years (1137–80). From his father he inherited a united kingdom, at peace with itself and abroad, sound finances and, above all, Abbé Suger. But he inherited little of his father’s strength of character. Jealously in love, he immediately fell under the spell of his bride, Eleanor, a formidable modern-age woman, intelligent and well read, coquettish and highly sexed—married at fifteen, divorced at twenty-eight, died at eighty-two, and perhaps the most outstanding personality of her age. Louis’ religious policy, led by Eleanor, created a falling out with the Pope, and led to excommunication. To gain reconciliation with Rome, the King set forth on a crusade—the conventional wisdom of those days. Fearful of leaving her alone in Paris, because of her amorous propensities, he took Eleanor with him. It proved a huge mistake. During a dangerous journey plagued with heat and hunger, Eleanor came to detest her weak husband. In Syria she fell into the arms of a youthful uncle, Raymond of Aquitaine, Prince of Antioch. Pressing on to besiege Jerusalem, there Eleanor was rumoured to have bestowed her favours on a handsome Moorish slave, while Louis suffered a serious military defeat.

At home Suger ruled as regent but he had to dispense some of his own considerable wealth—as well as ransacking the coffers of Saint-Denis—to maintain political loyalties. He managed to stifle the threat of revolt by the King’s younger brother, the Comte de Dreux; but, now a frail old man, he wrote urging Louis to return post-haste. “The disturbers of the kingdom have returned,” he wrote: and you, who should be here to defend it, remain like a prisoner in exile . . . You have handed over the lamb to the wolf . . . As for the Queen, your wife, we counsel you, if you will, to conceal your resentment until, having come home by God’s grace, you can settle that matter with all others . . .³

Louis returned with Eleanor, pregnant with another man’s child. Suger was able to report, “we have seen to it that your houses and palaces are in good order.”

Suger gave Louis one conclusive piece of advice: that he should not divorce Eleanor, but put the interests of the kingdom above his personal grievances. Two years after the royal couple’s return, Suger died, and without his counsel, in 1152 Louis obtained an annulment from the Pope—on the grounds that he and Eleanor were too closely related. Only another two years later, a free Eleanor married Henry Plantagenet, the future Henry II of England, a potent and ruthless warlord. Although he was many years her junior, she was to give Henry a row of troublesome sons—as well as Aquitaine, representing over half of the territory that Louis the Fat had bequeathed his inadequate son. From this personal and national humiliation came a cause for what French historians call the “first” Hundred Years’ War.

All the political achievements of Louis VI began to fall apart. Within ten years of Suger’s death, Louis the Young had been defeated in battle by Eleanor’s new husband, and had been supplanted in Brittany and Toulouse as well. By the end of his long reign France was reduced geographically to what it had been in the time of the first Capetians, and Louis had let his father’s bequest—the beauty of Aquitaine, her rich dowry and all his gains—slip away.

LOUIS HAD TWO DAUGHTERS, supposedly, by Eleanor—but no heir. He remarried, but his second wife died childless. His third wife, Alix of Champagne, in 1165 finally produced a son who—fifteen years later—was to become Philippe II, named Augustus like a Roman emperor, because he had been born in August. After his death, his sobriquet in France would be “Philip the Conqueror.”

The day which determined his reputation and the direction of his reign was 27 July 1214. The battle of Bouvines was to set the future shape not only of France but of Britain, too. Less than ten miles equidistant from the present-day cities of Tournai (in Belgium) and Lille, Bouvines lies in soggy Flanders, site of the terrible battlefields where the destiny of France was to be played out exactly 700 years later. Bouvines was won by Philippe-Auguste’s France against a powerful coalition of foes headed by King John of England, on a Sunday—controversially, for in those days of rigid religious observance, knights and kings observed the Sabbath as far as battle was concerned.

But France’s King Philippe-Auguste needed to exploit every advantage, fair or foul. When he arrived on the throne in 1180, aged fifteen, he inherited a tiny state, a fraction the size of Plantagenet England and its European dependencies, once again land-locked, and surrounded by powerful rivals. How then did he come to find himself fighting—and winning—such a key battle in so unpromising a corner of Europe? At the time of his succession, the odds against him, and France, would have seemed hopeless.

THE RULER OF ENGLAND, Henry II, was an imposing figure, particularly in the early stages of his rule: of medium height but strongly built, arm muscles like a professional wrestler, and legs bowed from being constantly on horseback. His face was leonine (in fact, a movie once epitomised him as “The Lion in Winter” in his stormy old age); there were no concessions to culture either in his unkingly and often neglected garb (he never wore gloves over his large, calloused hands) or in his way of life. Travelling ceaselessly between his English and French realms, he was seldom known to sit down—except at table, or on a horse. He was the quintessential man of action, of tireless energy. A contemporary wrote of him:

If the King has decided to spend the day anywhere, especially if his royal will to do so has been publicly proclaimed by herald, you may be certain that he will get off early in the morning, and this sudden change will throw everyone’s plans into confusion . . . His pleasure, if I may dare say so, is increased by the straits to which his courtiers are put . . . ⁴

A nightmare for officialdom.

We have no clear physical portrait of his fellow monarch, Louis VII, whose powerful wife he had acquired, but we know that, in contrast, Louis was an educated man, gentle and pious, compassionate to the poor—and even conspicuously tolerant (for those days) towards the Jews. He lived simply, without pomp, mingling freely and unescorted with the citizens of Paris. Once, comparing himself with Henry, he observed wryly, “He has everything in abundance—men, horses, gold, silk, diamonds, game and fruit. We in France, we have only bread, wine—and gaiety.” Louis was a man of moral scruples; on good terms with the Church, he would never have countenanced the liquidation of his Archbishop. As a statesman, however, decisiveness and good judgement were not his middle names; nor was good luck.

Henry’s French father, Plantagenet Duke of Anjou, had brought him the rich territories of Anjou and Normandy; and England, through his marriage to the unhappy Matilda, heiress to William the Conqueror’s son, Henry I. Between Matilda and her cousin, King Stephen, England had been reduced to anarchy and was, by the time Henry Plantagenet came to the throne in 1154 at the age of twenty-one, urgently in need of strong rule. Swiftly Henry quenched the civil war that racked the country, establishing the “King’s Peace,” maintained through a native common law—a feature novel to European monarchies. With equal speed he defeated the unruly Scots and Welsh, bringing even the Irish to heel. He gave peace to the islands for the first time in generations, crushing the last of the barons’ revolts in 1173. In short order, he found himself reigning unchallenged from the Cheviots to the Pyrenees, his short-lived Angevin Empire looming over the tiny plot centred round Paris that was France.

With little of the pre-Conquest Anglo-Saxon influences still extant, Henry’s England was indeed like a kind of alternative France. French was his mother tongue; the “English Establishment” followed suit—and continued to do so well into the reign of Edward III nearly two centuries later—while for the priesthood in both countries Latin was the lingua franca. The refined French words for food, such as “beef,” “mutton” and porc,” had already replaced in English their cruder Anglo-Saxon originals like “ox,” “sheep” and “swine.” Trans-Channel fancies were carried away by the lilt and swing of French songs, as imported by the troubadours, by the verve of French story-telling, and by a great wave of French poetry that swept over England (and, indeed, most of Europe), threatening to obliterate the unsophisticated native Beowulf. During Henry’s years of peace, a new English yeoman figure grew up where the agriculturalist and the huntsman tended to replace the warrior knight—the birth of the English country gentleman. Gradually the dour fortified stone castles of Stephen’s turbulent times became replaced by manor houses similar in style to the early colleges that were to grow up later in Oxford and Cambridge. At the lower end of the social scale, the “villein” (in itself a French word), though in fee to his lord and in no sense a “free man,” and whose lot was to be little improved by Magna Carta, was probably beginning to enjoy marginally more beneficial rights than his French opposite number.

With Bismarckian cunning, Henry, expanding in all directions, set about the encirclement of Louis’ France by a network of alliances; at times in his reign it looked as if the Franco-English Capetians were to become vassals of the empire controlled from Westminster and Rouen. Yet there was something artificial, vulnerably ephemeral about the Angevin Empire. The unattended pendulum swings between triumph and disaster could be particularly sudden and dramatic in twelfth-century Europe—with the fate of a country so closely tied to the life and fortunes of its leader. One such swing, just in time for Louis, occurred on 29 December 1170, with the murder of Archbishop Thomas à Becket—apparently invoked, if not actually ordered, by the King. Undoubtedly a thorn in the side of the King, and a stormy petrel within the Church, dead the “turbulent priest” became an instant international martyr, and a saint. Henry could wear a horse-hair shirt and have himself flogged in Avranches Cathedral by way of atonement—yet his image, and his power, would never quite recover from this particular bloodstain.

THE INCREASINGLY UNPOPULAR HENRY now enacted a Lear-like break-up of his territories among his sons, Henry the Young (aged fifteen in 1270), Richard, the future “Coeur de Lion” (aged twelve), and Geoffrey (aged eleven); John, born only in 1167, was left out of the carve-up, and was thus to be known henceforth for ever in France as “Jean sans Terre.” As Lear discovered, this was to prove folly in the extreme. Prince Henry, already crowned in 1170 and strategically married to the daughter of Louis VII, was treated by his father-in-law as if he were already king, but in fact was never to succeed.

In 1173, there was popular insurrection in France. Henry crushed, one by one, all the coalitions mounted against him. Most humiliating was the defeat of Louis at Verneuil, taking flight even as Henry approached with his army. The following year Louis was routed again at Rouen, deplorably destroying all his heavy weaponry. Once again Paris seemed directly menaced; and it became more vulnerable when, in 1176, the worst flooding of the Seine in memory swept away both bridges, carried off mills, houses and livestock on the crumbling banks, and came close to engulfing the city. Attempting a form of flood control untried in modern times, Louis and his entire court and every undrowned monk and priest, headed by the bishop of Paris, went in procession to the edge of the swirling waters. Holding aloft a nail from the True Cross, the bishop prayed: “In this sign of the Holy Passion, may the waters return to their bed and this miserable people be protected!” The rain stopped, and the waters ebbed just in time. Paris appeared to be saved once more by divine intervention.

The following year the Pope, threatening an interdict on all the provinces of the Angevin Empire, intervened to impose peace between Henry and Louis—just as Henry was about to mount the decisive assault on Paris. Considering the debility of Louis, the terms were generous. The uprising demonstrated Henry’s power but also the inherent weakness in his empire—the divisiveness of his quarrelsome sons, greedy for territory and glory. Their future adversary, Philippe-Auguste, heir to the ageing Louis, saw it; aged only nine, standing before Henry’s seemingly unassailable fortress at Gisors, and showing his future mettle, he is said to have remarked to his entourage: “I only wish this pile of stones could be silver, gold or diamonds . . . the more precious the materials of this castle, the greater pleasure I would have in possessing it when it will have fallen into my hands.” ⁵He would have to wait the best part of a generation.

IN 1180 LOUIS THE YOUNG DIED. Philippe-Auguste (1180–1223) succeeded him, aged fifteen, although he had virtually taken over already the previous year during Louis’ last illness, from what appears to have been a stroke that paralysed his right side. By the end of his reign of forty-three years, Philippe-Auguste would have increased the original fiefdom of Hugues Capet more than forty-fold. He nearly did not accede to the throne at all, however; while out hunting with his father the previous year, Philippe-Auguste, having been lost for two days in the Forest of Compiègne, was taken gravely ill. The King prayed for his recovery on the tomb of the martyred Thomas à Becket; Philippe-Auguste recovered, and—supposedly appearing in a vision to a French holy man—Becket declared that the young heir had been chosen to avenge his murder. To the superstitious, it was an encouraging prelude to the new reign.

Philippe-Auguste properly earned the reputation of being rusé comme un renard (“cunning as a fox”). The only existing contemporary pen-portrait of him⁶ describes him as a handsome, strapping fellow, bald but with a cheerful face of ruddy complexion, and a temperament much inclined towards good-living, wine and women. He was generous to his friends, stingy towards those who displeased him, well-versed in the art of stratagem, orthodox in belief, prudent and stubborn in his resolves. He made judgements with great speed and exactitude. Fortune’s favourite, fearful for his life, easily excited and easily placated, he was very tough with powerful men who resisted him, and took pleasure in provoking discord among them. Never, however, did he cause an adversary to die in prison. He liked to employ humble men [petits gens], to be the subduer of the proud, the defender of the Church and feeder of the poor.

Above all, Philippe-Auguste developed as a diplomat and tactician supreme; more than a knight, he was a skilful and crafty politician beyond his times. He had an aptitude for seeking the counsel of intelligent men of humble birth, notably Brother Guérin, Bishop of Senlis and Barthélemy de Roye, and he restricted his advisers at court to a very small circle. He was to give the French monarchy “the three instruments of rule which it lacked: tractable officials, money and soldiers.”

BISHOP GUÉRIN WAS A MEMBER of the crusading order of the Knights Hospitallers of Jerusalem, where he was probably discovered by Philippe-Auguste. He was rich in property, principally south of Paris, through royal favour. Just before Bouvines, he was elected bishop of Senlis, close to Paris. After his election to this see, he and his church received important benefactions from the King, as was to be expected. Presiding over the exchequer, he also acted as judge, held inquests, issued commands and served on frequent special missions. As a cleric and a bishop, Guérin attended to purely ecclesiastical affairs, for example the investigation of heresy at Paris in 1209, but his position in the Church did not prevent him from also playing a key military role.

France was soon at war again. By the fifth year of his reign, the young Philippe-Auguste had managed to expand his kingdom northwards and southwards—including the key city of Amiens. Almost immediately, he found himself at war with the mighty Henry.

Henry was already old beyond his years and Philippe-Auguste was cunning in forming alliances with his ambitious sons, first Geoffrey, then Richard. By the beginning of 1188 Philippe-Auguste had doubled his forces through alliance with Richard and was poised to move into Henry’s Normandy. Then suddenly came news from the Middle East that the Saracen, Saladin, had taken Jerusalem. The Pope summoned the Christian kings to cease fighting each other, and embark on a fresh crusade (the third). Before they could embark, Henry had died, on 7 July 1189, in the chapel of his French château of Chinon. It was a sad end for the old lion, his valets pillaging him of every last belonging, leaving the King “naked, as he had come into the world, save for his shirt and breeches.”⁷On the 20th, Richard was crowned Duke of Normandy in Rouen, then King of England in London on 3 September. He and Philippe-Auguste then departed, as allies and close friends, for the Holy Land.

RICHARD “COEUR DE LION” was not the quintessence of the romantic, chivalrous crusading knight that posterity has made him seem. As a young prince he cruelly suppressed revolts in Aquitaine, and according to French chronicles, he indulged in debauchery, “abducting the wives and daughters of his subjects to make them his concubines, and then to hand them over to his soldiers.” He was arrogant, with a habit of sowing rancour around him. At home in England (which he rashly left in the disloyal and incompetent hands of his brother John “Lackland”) he was accepted as a neglectful, popular absentee ruler, as befitting the repute of a knight errant. But he also possessed the external glitter and generosity lacking in his father; was even more energetic, bolder, and possibly more ambitious, too. The glamour obscured deceptively the able military tactician and tough politician. He was not a man to be antagonised.

In contrast, Philippe-Auguste made provision for the sound governance of France in his absence. In a famous document, the Testament of 1190, he ordered the construction of a continuous fortified wall girdling Paris, making it impregnable for the first time. It was just as well, insofar as he and his close friend, Richard,¹⁰ were soon to become bitterest enemies. Reaching Genoa together, the two leaders first fell out over the number of ships each was to provide for crossing the Mediterranean. Finally arriving in the Holy Land, the two Kings managed to tip the balance in the terrible siege of Acre, already under attack for two years. But by the time of its capitulation in July 1191, intrigues and the stresses of a grim campaign had undermined the Anglo-French entente; to the enduring rage of Richard, Philippe-Auguste now decided to break off his part in the Third Crusade and head for home.

By the end of 1191, Philippe-Auguste was celebrating Christmas at Fontainebleau, “boasting with impudence of soon being able to invade the domains of the King of England.”⁸ Richard, on the other hand, during his journey home was locked up by the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VI, for months in the Danube fortress of Dürrenstein—pending payment of ransom. In deplorably bad faith, Philippe-Auguste and Richard’s brother John endeavoured to bribe the Emperor to continue to detain him but Emperor Henry thoughtfully revealed all to Richard. He finally reached London in March 1194, and immediately he launched a fresh war. It was to last five years, with an unremitting ferocity rare in the twelfth century.

No quarter was given, with both sides issuing orders to blind or drown prisoners of war. On 3 July 1194, Philippe-Auguste suffered his greatest humiliation, at Fréteval in the Vendôme, losing his baggage train, his treasury and the national archives. To prevent Philippe-Auguste ever again threatening Normandy and to bottle him up in Paris, Richard constructed an unassailable fortress at Château Gaillard, on a key bend in the Seine—still a most imposing castle commanding the approaches to Paris. Defeat followed defeat for Philippe-Auguste.

By the end of 1198, it looked as if France would become a fiefdom of either Richard or the Emperor. Once again, intervention came from afar. News from Spain that the Moors were threatening a new invasion led Pope Innocent III to ordain a truce between the combatants. The results were extremely tough on Philippe-Auguste, forfeiting all of Normandy save the citadel of Gisors; and with it France lost all the winnings of the past ten years. Had Philippe-Auguste died at this point, he would have been remembered with scorn, for it seemed only a matter of time before Richard renewed the war, with a final drive on Paris.

Then, in the miraculous manner in which fortune could be reversed in the Middle Ages, while besieging a rebel fortress in Limousin on 26 March 1199, Richard was wounded in the left shoulder by a bolt from a crossbow. Gangrene set in. Just before he died, the warrior-king with a last chivalrous gesture requested that his assailant be spared, and given a sum of money. The moment he was dead, however, the bowman was flayed alive and impaled. “King Richard is dead, and a thousand years have passed since there died a man whose loss was so great. Never has there been his equal . . . throughout the world he made himself dreaded by some and cherished by others,” ⁹ sang the troubadours. In Paris, Philippe-Auguste could now look to deal with the weak, evil and hated “Jean sans Terre.”

ALL THROUGH CAPETIAN FRANCE’s struggles against the Plantagenets, Louis VII and his son had to contend with another powerful, and often unpredictable, player: at the wave of his crucifix the Pope could summon up armies and nations to bring to bear on a miscreant ruler. In the Middle Ages, the issue of death and eternal damnation was uppermost in all people’s minds. Every man and woman hoped to die with Christ’s words on their lips; to die “unshriven” was the worst fate imaginable. Life was indeed a preparation for death, and though by the later Middle Ages views on the after-life had lost some of their certainty, in the twelfth century, notions of Purgatory were little considered; it was a straight choice between the Bosom of Abraham and the Cauldron of Hell. Such was the dread of eternal damnation, of excommunication or an “interdict” upon a nation, that the mere threat could reverse policies and upturn thrones. Perhaps never again would the influence of the Pope be greater.

Pope at the time of the accession of Philippe-Auguste was Alexander III (1159–81), who had strongly supported Becket’s stand against royal encroachment on Church matters. His successor was Innocent III (1198–1216)—there was a certain irony in the name, since he had his tentacles everywhere in the Christian world. Even so, his authority was challenged by the Holy Roman Emperors and an array of four imperial Anti-Popes. Like other rulers, these medieval Popes found themselves constrained to juggle alliances with often bewildering rapidity.

Innocent had been much impressed by his pilgrimage to the shrine of Becket in Canterbury. An inveterate Crusader, only the intervention of death prevented him from leading himself the Fifth Crusade in 1217. He was described as “strong, stable, magnanimous and very sharp,” with no doubts whatsoever that the Pope was invested with the ultimate authority over the secular world as well as the Church. Christ, he declared, had left to Peter “the Government not only of the Church but of the whole world.” Within the Church he stood for reform (which it badly needed), and orthodoxy; beyond it, secular rulers (not to mention infidels) crossed him at their peril. It was a standpoint that, eventually, was to bring into being Protestantism, but under Innocent Rome probably reached its political apogee.

PHILIPPE-AUGUSTE’S FATHER had fallen into (temporary) papal displeasure through divorcing Eleanor, but this was nothing compared with the trouble that overtook Philippe-Auguste, reverberating at various times to shake the course of his military and political successes. His first wife, Isabelle of Hainault, who had brought him Artois, died aged only nineteen. In 1193, he entered into another politically adroit union with Ingeborg of Denmark, a very pretty girl of eighteen. Usefully, her brother the King still maintained claims on England dating back to pre-Conquest days—and a considerable fleet. But the unfortunate Ingeborg arrived in France only for Philippe-Auguste to be mysteriously seized by irremediable aversion to her on their wedding night. He tried to persuade King Knut to have her back; the King refused, and complained to the Vatican. Philippe-Auguste divorced Ingeborg, who—after a spell in prison—was placed in a French convent, and three years later he married bigamously a Bavarian princess, Agnes of Merano.

One of the first acts of the succession by Innocent III was for the Pope to declare: “The Holy See cannot abandon persecuted women without defending them.” He ordered the divorce annulled, and the remarriage, under threat of personal excommunication of the King. An interdict on the whole kingdom was enforced in 1198—to the deep distress of Philippe-Auguste’s subjects. Finally, after nine months of resistance, he formally submitted on all counts.

Philippe-Auguste, however, was being less than honest. He sequestered Ingeborg, first in a château in the Forest of Rambouillet, then in a state of house-arrest at Étampes, while Agnes remained in France, set up in a château closer to Paris. Despite the death of Agnes in 1201, Ingeborg continued to besiege the Pope:

I am persecuted by my Lord and husband, Philip, who not only does not treat me as his wife, but causes to be showered on me outrages and calumnies by his servants. In this prison, . . . no one dares to come to visit me, no priest is allowed in to comfort my soul in bringing me the Holy Gospel . . . I do not even have enough clothes, and those that I wear are not worthy of a queen . . . Finally, I am locked up in a house from which I am forbidden to leave.¹⁰

France and the Vatican were close to rupture; but, politically, they needed each other. After a decade, suddenly, in 1212, Philippe-Auguste announced that he was going to take Ingeborg back as his queen—if not his wife. But, as usual with Philippe-Auguste, the considerations were purely political, rather than sentimental. He had decided to administer the coup de grâce to King John, and to invade England; for which he needed the support of Ingeborg’s brother, the King of Denmark, and— above all—of the Pope.

The distasteful story of Ingeborg showed the new power of the Capetian monarchy under Philippe-Auguste. He had openly defied and outmanoeuvred that most powerful pontiff over a period of twenty years when all the faults were manifestly on his side. It also demonstrated an undeflectable determination to act for himself and for France.

BY 1213, King John had alienated his subjects in France; in particular, the murder of his young nephew, Arthur, in Rouen during the winter of 1203–4, caused even greater revulsion than the murder of Archbishop Becket under his father’s reign. His treatment of rebels went before him; on one occasion he had flung into a dungeon the wife of a rebel knight and her child, with only a bundle of oats and a piece of raw bacon for sustenance. Eleven days later both were found dead, the mother having eaten the cheeks of her child. In April 1204, after an eight-month siege, Philippe-Auguste had captured Coeur de Lion’s imposing fortress of Château Gaillard, his intended jumping-off point for the capture of Paris. He entered Rennes in Brittany, where no Capet had set foot since the beginning of the dynasty. From there Philippe-Auguste proceeded to the capture of Rouen, the Angevin capital in France, followed by the whole of Normandy within a matter of two months (a shorter time than it took Anglo-American might to wrest it from the Germans in 1944). The fall of Normandy meant the end of Henry II’s short-lived Angevin Empire. Philippe-Auguste now sat down seriously to plan the invasion of Jean-sans-Terre’s England and the creation of a new Angevin Empire, in reverse, with its capital in Paris.

Momentarily, it looked as if Philippe-Auguste had all the chips—the Pope, the Danish fleet and the Emperor—and he had already seized Brittany, Maine and Anjou. In 1213, John fell foul of Innocent III for rejecting Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury, and was placed under an interdict, with Philippe-Auguste openly invited to invade, remove John’s crown and place it on the head “of someone who would be worthy.” He had a candidate—his son and heir, Louis—and had already been at work subverting the Welsh and Irish against John as well as some of his own English barons. According to a French chronicler, he awoke one morning exclaiming, “God, what am I waiting for to go and conquer the English?”¹¹ His preparations, however, had been carefully laid. In the first serious attempt at invasion between William the Conqueror and Napoleon, a fleet of 1500 sails and an immense army was poised in the Channel ports. Like Napoleon in 1804–5 it was ready and waiting at Boulogne, on 8 May 1213.

Then, just two weeks later, as Philippe-Auguste was about to embark, came the shattering news that Innocent—perhaps still mistrusting the wayward King, and showing his claws—had reversed his policy yet again. He had become reconciled to a humbled John, prepared to meet all the Pope’s demands. Philippe-Auguste was ordered to stand off.

A menacing Anglo-German-Flemish coalition against France was patched together by King John and his nephew, Otto IV of Brunswick, the Holy Roman Emperor across the Rhine—resentful of Philippe-Auguste’s opposing his candidacy to the imperial throne. They were supported by French counts Ferrand and Renaud, holding domains that were vitally strategic to France and regarded by Philippe-Auguste as arch-traitors for their switching of allegiances.

Bent on revenge, in 1214 John embarked on a two-prong strategy. At the beginning of July, John himself attacked in Aquitaine, where the future Louis VIII, aged twenty-six, managed to defeat John and an army three times the size at the key position of Roche-au-Moine, close to Angers—but it was a demoralised army that hated him.

Philippe-Auguste was delighted with his heir’s success, but the main threat to France lay on the other front. On the plain of Flanders, Otto and his allies had concentrated a force of 80,000 men—a truly immense army for those days—intent on moving southwards on Paris.

THE WEAPONRY, if not the tactics, of the forthcoming battle reminded one a little of the first engagement of the tank in the First World War. The cannon was not to make its appearance on the European battlefield till Crécy in 1346, where—cumbersome and unreliable—it was still hardly a serious weapon. The deadly English longbow, lethal at 240 yards, was to win battles of the Hundred Years’ War for England, but would not come into its own for nearly another hundred years. Thus the master of the battlefield in 1214 was the mounted knight, heavily armoured in chain mail and equipped with either a long lance or a heavy slashing—rather than a piercing—sword. But his huge helm severely limited his vision and so heavy was his armour that, if dismounted, he could not remount—or even rise to his feet unaided. He was a prey to the lesser soldier, the infantry foot sergeants who unhorsed the knights with long hooks, harpooning them by the links of their armour, and throwing them down into the dust; or who got underneath the horses to disembowel them with poignards.

At the lowest level were the murderous villeins of low birth who roamed the battlefield, opening the visors of wounded knights to dispatch them with a blow through the eye, then rob them (no true knight would besmirch his honour with such handiwork). The knight’s long-suffering steed demanded a huge lumbering beast, originating from Byzantium and bred on his feudal domains, which formed the base of medieval society.

As far as the mercilessness of the battlefield went, one famous description of King Harold, after being wounded by the fatal arrow at Hastings, was still relevant:

Harold, though disabled, still breathed; four knights rushed upon him and despatched him with various wounds . . . One thrust pierced through the shield of the dying King and stabbed him in the breast; another assailant finished the work by striking off his head with his sword. But even this vengeance was not enough. A third pierced the dead body and scattered about the entrails; the fourth, coming, it would seem, too late for any more efficient share in the deed, cut off the King’s leg as he lay dead.¹²

Wounds delivered in battle by hacking blows were in general likely to prove mutilating rather than fatal. Those who survived them were then at the hands of the crude surgeons; where pain was certain, recovery was a great deal less so.

Actual fatalities on the twelfth-century European battlefield tended to be moderate—at least compared with the butcheries to be seen in later epochs, let alone the massacres perpetrated in the East by Philippe-Auguste’s exact contemporary, Genghis Khan. The spirit of the tournament single-combat reigned, with noble knights seeking la gloire in confrontation with their peers, rather than the wholesale slaughter of the lower orders. A prisoner alive was worth far more, in terms of ransom, than a dead enemy.

AS THE TWO MASSIVE FORCES approached each other in Flanders, Philippe-Auguste was about to celebrate his forty-ninth birthday (thus no longer young by the standards of the day). He could muster no more than 25,000 men, of which 500 were chevaliers,to the Allies’ 80,000 and 1500 knights.¹¹ On Philippe-Auguste’s side the infantry consisted, for the first time, of a substantial body of bourgeois Communes, regarded as “a great novelty”¹³ and which were to play a role of historic significance. (Like rival claims during the Battle of Britain air war, figures vary however with nationality; one French expert, Georges Duby, put Philippe-Auguste’s knights at 1300 and infantry at 4000–6000, while Otto was never able to concentrate more than a portion of his unwieldy great force.)

The news reaching Otto’s camp of John’s defeat at Roche-au-Moine must have been demoralising. There were other reports reaching the Allies that Philippe-Auguste was falling back in retreat, but the French King appreciated that it was in his interest to strike fast, and boldly, before Otto could bring up his rearguard from Lorraine and Germany. Therefore, instead of attacking frontally, Philippe-Auguste decided to engage Otto by a turning movement, via Tournai and Lille.

Otto’s intention was to strike for Paris and the royal domain, which had already been apportioned to his main allies and numerous German barons, as the putative spoils of war. But on hearing of Philippe-Auguste’s presence at Tournai, Otto moved north to meet him. Only Count Renaud counselled caution: “I know the French and their daring,” he warned: “it would be rash to fight them in open country.” But “hawks” like Hugues de Boves urged immediate pursuit to catch the French divided as they crossed the River Marcq, at Bouvines. The bridge at Marcq lay in a position of prime importance, the only crossing point in a swampy area, and the meeting point of French, Flemish and imperial territories. The high ground on either side offered good hard-going for cavalry. A consideration caused both kings to hesitate, however, before facing battle; it was then 27 July, a Sunday.

When the French rearguard spotted the Allies in full battle array, Brother Guérin, Bishop-elect of Senlis, proposed that the King draw up his lines to meet the enemy. The other counsellors thought that the Allies would never fight on the sabbath, but Guérin’s judgement was confirmed when the French rearguard reported fierce attacks. The final decision to engage the imperial forces was supposedly taken while Philippe-Auguste was resting, exhausted and with his armour off, under the shade of an ash tree.

NOW, IN SHORT ORDER, the King performed rituals to consecrate the forthcoming battle, in which it was believed God’s judgement would be revealed. Philippe-Auguste entered a nearby chapel to pray briefly, armed himself, and mounted his horse “as if summoned to a wedding feast.”¹⁴ To his troops, he made a stirring proclamation:

You are my men and I am your king. I wear the crown but I am a man like you. But since I am your king you are well-loved by me. And for this reason, I pray you, on this day keep my honour and yours. And if the crown should be worn more appropriately by one of you, I will take it off and give it to him with a good heart. You may all be king and, are you not already, since without you I cannot govern?¹²

Mindful of the defection of his old allies Renaud and Ferrand, he warned his barons: “Protect me, and you will do well. For, with me, you will lose nothing. But double-cross me, and I will pursue you—wherever you may go.”¹⁵ While the royal chaplain chanted psalms of victory on the battlefield, the King then blessed his troops with outstretched hands.

To the blare of trumpets and chanting of psalms the battle formations were drawn up, in three groups facing the field and extending across the road from Tournai. In the centre was the King. The French right wing was commanded by Guérin and the Duke of Burgundy, facing an array of Flemish knights led by Count Ferrand. The left wing was entrusted to Count Robert and Bishop Philippe of Beauvais, both royal cousins. The infantry of the Communes participated with contingents of sergeants stationed at the centre and on the left.

The French rearguard was hit five times by forces under Ferrand and Renaud, but they were surprised to find that it was well organised. “Who ever told me,” the Emperor exclaimed, “that the King of France was in flight?” Strung out in a long line, unprepared for a major battle, the Allied army was forced to regroup quickly before those in the rear could come up. It was now about 12:00 hours.

It was the canicule, or “dog-days” of summer, and 27 July was a day of intense heat, appalling for knights in heavy armour, fighting half-blinded by the sweat pouring down inside their helmets. In the heavy dust churned up by thousands of horses, it would have been almost as hard to obtain an overall picture as for Stendhal’s Fabrice at Waterloo, so that our account of the battle is largely limited to that of an eye-witness standing close to King Philippe-Auguste, Guillaume le Breton. Guillaume’s account rings of the Iliad of Troy with its emphasis on heroic single combats, but is informative on tactical movement—and the best we have.

As seen by Guillaume, the course of the battle evolved in three scenes, with the French right wing being the first to engage, then the centre, and finally the left. Bishop Guérin began the action on the right with a sally by mounted sergeants from the Abbey of Saint-Médard, but the Flemish nobles, “disdainful of this plebeian cavalry, received them on their lances without moving, disembowelling their horses.” ¹⁶ Then three Flemish chevaliers rode out of the lines, challenging their French peers to combat. In a first exchange, two were taken prisoner; the third—Eustache de Macheleu—barely had time to shout “Mort aux Français!” when he was knocked off his horse and his throat slit.

This initial success gave Guérin’s men encouragement, and a solid phalanx of their cavalry 200 strong smashed through the Flemish line, causing it to reel back in disarray. The French leader, Eudes Duke of Burgundy, fell under his mount but his guard managed to put him back in the saddle and “furious, he killed all who got in his way.”

In the centre, the imperial sergeants were able to break through the lines of the Communes foot-soldiers drawn up in formation in front of the King. Striking back at them, Philippe-Auguste became briefly separated from his bodyguard. The King was surrounded by the enemy infantry, who unhorsed him with their long hooks. Pouncing on the fallen King, Otto’s men tried in vain to find a chink in his coat-of-mail in which to thrust a fatal dagger.

In these brief seconds the whole history of France lay in the balance. However, the King’s heavy armour and a quick response from the knights of his household, who threw themselves down protectively on his fallen body, saved Philippe-Auguste’s life. They offered him a fresh horse and conducted him to safety.

The imperial attack was matched by a French counter-attack that equally imperilled Emperor Otto’s life. Two French knights and Guillaume des Barres got close enough to unhorse him, but four imperial knights succeeded in conveying the Emperor to safety, although they themselves were captured. Otto galloped off the battlefield alone, hardly stopping until he had reached his base camp at Valenciennes, 30 kilometres away.

Observing the flight of the Emperor, Philippe-Auguste remarked: “We will not see his face any more today!” The battered imperial insignia, with Otto’s fear-inducing great eagle mounted above a dragon, was brought triumphantly to the French King on a four-wheeled chariot, and then transported to the capital along with the captives and booty.

French attentions on the left flank now focused on the “arch-traitor” Renaud, Count of Boulogne. During the battle Renaud declared to his old friend, the hawkish Hugues de Boves: “Here’s the battle you wanted, and which I didn’t. Now you can flee, panicking like the rest of them. As for me, I shall continue fighting and be captured or killed.” ¹⁷ Renaud continued to fight, with the courage of despair, all through the afternoon surrounded by a double line of protective infantry.

Above the confusion of battle, Renaud’s imposingly tall figure could be seen with its enormous lance and double black plumes attached to his helmet, a magnetically enticing target. Eventually, a French foot-sergeant, Pierre de la Tournelle, managed to creep under Renaud’s horse, and Renaud fell. A lively dispute ensued among the French knights as to who would have the honour of capturing the traitor alive, before the battered and bleeding Renaud finally surrendered to Guérin.

By five o’clock, the fighting was all but over, having lasted no more than five hours. Philippe-Auguste’s victory was complete, while the main enemy army had not been engaged. Had Otto listened earlier to Count Renaud’s cunctatory advice, the outcome might have been different.

AS NIGHT APPROACHED, up on the plateau overlooking Bouvines, there remained a troop of 700 Brabant infantrymen, abandoned debris of Otto’s vast army, who bravely refused to surrender. In an act of savagery such as sometimes marred the chivalry of medieval warfare, Philippe-Auguste had them massacred to the last man.

Finally, at the call of trumpets the French troops returned to their camp with great rejoicing. There was no accurate count of the casualties at Bouvines, but—on the French side—they were light, possibly not more than 300 knights killed. The list of captured chieftains was impressive. One hundred and thirty of them were assigned to prisons and custodians, and their names recorded—as an insult to the Emperor—in the French Royal Archives. The military leadership of the coalition were incarcerated at the Louvre and Péronne, thus effectively dissolving John’s coalition against his French rival.

Renaud of Boulogne was kept cruelly shackled to a wall by a chain only half a metre long. He would die in incarceration thirteen years later. Ferrand of Flanders was assigned to Philippe-Auguste’s newly built tower of the Louvre, which stood outside the defensive city walls of Paris that he had constructed, and the other captives to the two châtelets guarding the bridges linking the Île de la Cité with both banks of the Seine. Apart from the fate of these two, Philippe-Auguste was generous in the clemency he showed to the others, though the ransoms that accompanied the liberation enormously enriched the French exchequer.

PHILIPPE-AUGUSTE’S VICTORY at Bouvines evoked waves of spontaneous rejoicing; the populace danced, the clergy chanted and bells were rung. Flowers and branches festooned churches and houses, and carpeted the streets of towns and villages. Regardless of estate, family or sex, everyone converged on the route of the triumphant army. Workers in the fields rushed to see Count Ferrand led to Paris in chains. There, the townsmen and grandees alike greeted the King with such enthusiasm that—so Guillaume le Breton recorded: one day was not long enough to satisfy their celebrations. For an entire week the populace feasted, danced, sang and illuminated the nights with torches, so that one could see as clearly as in broad daylight. The students particularly didn’t stop rejoicing in numerous banquets, dancing and singing without cease . . .¹⁸

Bishop Guérin headed the procession into Paris, singing canticles and hymns, as the King walked behind.

At various crises in French history, propagandists would dust off the victory of Bouvines and recycle it as a touchstone of national faith: at the time of Louis-Philippe’s bourgeois monarchy in 1840, in the run-up to the First World War and post-1945, on occasion, as a victory over les anglo-saxons. On any account Bouvines was a remarkable victory. Like Napoleon in his finest victories of 1805 and 1806, Philippe-Auguste had succeeded in destroying his foes in detail, isolating first one (John) then the other (Otto). It was also a victory where superior morale triumphed.

Philippe-Auguste would reign for another nine years. For him, victory meant a remarkable reconciliation between the three orders of king, church and nobles. Never before had a French king been so secure on his throne, or France so secure in Europe. He had fought, and won, the first trulynational war in French history; but, as the Duke of Wellington observed on another battlefield not all that far from Bouvines, it had been a close-run thing.

DISTINGUISHED HISTORIANS, both British and French, are generally agreed that Bouvines was a turning point for both countries. Says G. M. Trevelyan:

The poetry-loving French Court, and the University and architectural schools of Paris, were the cultural centre of chivalric and crusading Europe. It was but natural that the Court should become, after Bouvines, the political centre of the French feudal provinces. But it failed to develop administrative institutions like those with which the Plantagenets strengthened the English throne, and the French monarchy was therefore destined, in the days of Crécy and Agincourt, to go down once more before renewed English attack from without and feudal treason within.¹⁹

England, as so often in her history, withdrew to concentrate on insular priorities, while France first became conscious of being a nation, and Paris of being a capital, more and more the centre of power. As Ernest Lavisse comments: “The two nations set off in different directions. England headed towards liberty, France towards absolutism.”²⁰

IN FRANCE, under the benevolence of Philippe-Auguste’s father, Louis VII, the Jews had been comparatively well treated. But to his shame, the reign of Philippe-Auguste was a particularly bad period: in French-Jewish lore, he came to be known as “that wicked King.” Still barely fifteen, he issued orders for the Jews under royal protection in Paris to be arrested in their synagogues, imprisoned and condemned to purchase their freedom through surrender of all their gold and silver, and precious vestments. This ploy granted Philippe-Auguste the immense sum of money of 31,500 livres, one and a half times a normal year’s revenue, for building the walls of Paris, and for equipping his army to defeat the Plantagenets. Two years later, he expelled the Jews from France, confiscating the totality of their wealth. Not only the Christian Church, but the great mass of wealthy French were delighted. Debts were wiped out—except for a fifth which the royal coffers appropriated.

Philippe-Auguste’s expulsions brought to an end the ancient juiverie on the Île de la Cité, their synagogue converted by Bishop Sully, creator of Notre-Dame, into the church of the Madeleine.

This harshness was mirrored in the dispensation of justice, accompanied with the most brutal punishments, devilish tortures and frequent executions. But, on the whole, it was even handed and in many ways his era must have seemed like something of a Golden Age for Frenchmen; a huge surge of prosperity and well-being flowed over Paris. Whereas John’s successor in England, Henry III, had to give up a campaign against the refractory Welsh in 1232 because of lack of funds, in 1221 Philippe-Auguste’s budget showed his government saving about one-third of its revenues. The King was able to pass to his heir a bequest of ten times the estimated annual ordinary income of the monarchy, or a daily revenue equivalent to over twenty times as much as his father had left him. Fortune had tilted in France’s favour.