Philip II

Philip II (born August 21, 1165, Paris, France—died July 14, 1223, Mantes) was the first of the great Capetian kings of medieval France (reigned 1180–1223), who gradually reconquered the French territories held by the kings of England and also furthered the royal domains northward into Flanders and southward into Languedoc. He was a major figure in the Third Crusade to the Holy Land in 1191.

Early life and kingship

Philip was the son of Louis VII of France and Adela of Champagne. In order to be associated as king with his father, who had fallen mortally ill, he was crowned at Reims on November 1, 1179. His uncles of the house of Champagne—Henry I, count of Champagne; Guillaume, archbishop of Reims; and Thibaut V, count of Blois and Chartres—hoped to use the youthful king to control France. To escape from their tutelage, Philip on April 28, 1180, married Isabella, the daughter of Baldwin V of Hainaut and the niece (through her mother) of Philip of Alsace, the count of Flanders, who promised to give the king the territory of Artois as her dowry.

When Henry II of England arrived in Normandy, perhaps with the intention of responding to an appeal by the house of Champagne, Philip II entered into negotiations with him and, at Gisors on June 28, 1180, renewed an understanding that Louis VII had reached with him in 1177. As a result, the house of Champagne was politically isolated, and Philip II was making all decisions for himself and acting as he saw fit when his father died, on September 18, 1180, leaving him sole king in name as well as in fact.

When the count of Flanders allied himself with the Champagne faction, there followed a serious revolt against the king. In the Peace of Boves, in July 1185 (confirmed by the Treaty of Gisors in May 1186), the king and the count of Flanders composed their differences (which had been chiefly over possession of Vermandois, in Picardy) so that the disputed territory was partitioned, Amiens and numerous other places passing to the king and the remainder, with the county of Vermandois proper, being left provisionally to Philip of Alsace. Thenceforward the king was free to run against Henry II of England.

Britannica Quiz

Kings and Emperors (Part III) Quiz

Territorial expansion

Henry’s French possessions—the so-called Angevin empire, consisting of Normandy, Maine, Anjou, and Touraine, with Aquitaine in the hands of his son, the future Richard I the Lion-Heart of England, and Brittany ruled by another son, Geoffrey (died 1186)—all were a constant menace to the French royal domain. Furthermore, there were long-standing disputes over the Vexin (between Normandy and the Île-de-France), Berry, and Auvergne.

Philip II launched an attack on Berry in the summer of 1187 but then in June made a truce with Henry, which left Issoudun in his hands and also granted him Fréteval, in Vendômois. Though the truce was for two years, Philip found grounds for resuming hostilities in the summer of 1188. He skillfully exploited the estrangement between Henry and Richard, and Richard did homage to him voluntarily at Bonmoulins in November 1188. Finally, by the Treaty of Azay-le-Rideau, or of Colombières (July 4, 1189), Henry was forced to renew his own homage, to confirm the cession of Issoudun, with Graçay also, to Philip, and to renounce his claim to suzerainty over Auvergne. Henry died two days later.

Richard, who succeeded Henry as king of England, had already undertaken to go on Crusade against Saladin in the Holy Land (the Third Crusade), and Philip now did likewise. Before his departure, he made the so-called Testament of 1190 to provide for the government of his kingdom in his absence. On his way to Palestine, he met Richard in Sicily, where they promptly found themselves at variance, though they made a treaty at Messina in March 1191. Arriving in Palestine, they cooperated against the Muslims at Acre, until Philip fell ill and made his illness a pretext for returning to France, quite determined to settle the succession to Flanders (Philip of Alsace had just died on the Crusade) while Richard was still absent. Thus, by the end of 1191, Philip II was back in France.

In spite of promises he had made in the Holy Land, Philip at once prepared to attack the Plantagenet possessions in France. Informed of this, Richard also left the Crusade but was taken prisoner while on his way back by the duke of Austria, Leopold V of Babenberg. Philip did everything he could to prolong his rival’s captivity, but Richard was at last set free (1194) and went to war against Philip. The French king suffered a number of defeats (from that at Fréteval in July 1194 to that at Courcelles in September 1198) in a series of campaigns that were occasionally punctuated by negotiations. It was fortuitous for Philip, however, when Richard was killed in April 1199.

Richard’s brother John was by no means as formidable a fighter. Moreover, his right to Richard’s succession could be contested by Arthur of Brittany, whose father had been senior to John. To secure the succession, therefore, John came to terms with Philip: by the Treaty of Le Goulet (May 22, 1200), in return for Philip’s recognition of him as Richard’s heir, he ceded Évreux and the Norman Vexin to Philip; agreed that Issoudun and Graçay should be the dowry of his niece Blanche of Castile, who was to marry the future Louis VIII (Philip’s son by Isabella of Hainaut); and renounced any claim to suzerainty over Berry and Auvergne.

Shortly afterward, however, John entered into conflict with the Lusignan family of Poitou (in Aquitaine), who appealed to Philip as overlord. When he was summoned to appear before the royal court as a vassal of the French crown, John did not present himself, and Philip, in April 1202, pronounced John’s French fiefs forfeit and undertook to carry out the sentence himself. He invaded Normandy, overran the northeast, and laid siege to Arques, while Arthur of Brittany, the son of Geoffrey, who died some years before, campaigned against John’s supporters in Poitou; but John, marching south from Maine, captured Arthur at Mirebeau (August 1). In fury, Philip abandoned the siege of Arques and marched southwestward to Tours, ravaging John’s territory on his way before returning to Paris. Guillaume des Roches, the powerful seneschal of Anjou, who had taken John’s side, came to terms with Philip in March 1203.

Resuming operations against Normandy, Philip occupied the towns around the great fortress of Château-Gaillard, to which he laid siege in September 1203, having overruled Pope Innocent III’s attempts to mediate. John, who is reported to have murdered Arthur of Brittany in April, retired to England in December, and Château-Gaillard fell to Philip in March 1204. Rouen, the Norman capital, surrendered in June, after 40 days’ resistance.

After his conquest of Normandy, Philip subdued Maine, Touraine, Anjou, and most of Poitou with less difficulty (1204–05), though the castles of Loches and Chinon held out for a year. He sought to secure his conquests by lavishing privileges on the towns and on the religious houses but otherwise left the local barons in power. Unrest, however, was endemic in Poitou, and in June 1206 John landed at La Rochelle. After a campaign in the south, he turned north toward the Loire. At Thouars in October 1206, he and Philip made a two-year truce, leaving John in possession of the reconquered Poitevin lands. In the following year, however, Philip invaded Poitou again; and, after a further campaign in 1208, only the south and part of the west of Poitou remained loyal to John (with Saintonge, Guyenne, and Gascony).

Philip next hoped to exploit the dispute between John and Pope Innocent III. While Innocent was threatening to declare John unfit to reign (1212), plans were being made for a French landing in England and for the accession of Philip’s son Louis to the English throne. The plans had to be dropped when John made his submission to the pope (1213). Throwing himself into schemes for revenge, John formed a coalition against France: the Holy Roman emperor Otto IV, the count of Flanders (Ferrand, or Ferdinand, of Portugal), and the count of Boulogne (Raynald, or Renaud, of Dammartin) were to invade the Capetian territory from the northeast while John attacked from the west, with the help of his Poitevin barons.

John landed at La Rochelle in February 1214 and advanced into Anjou but was put to flight by Louis at La Roche-aux-Moines on July 2; his confederates were completely defeated by Philip in the decisive Battle of Bouvines on July 27. The Anglo-Angevin power in France and the coalition had both been broken in one month. Thus Philip, who, in 1213, had transferred Brittany to his cousin Peter of Dreux, was left without any significant opposition to his rule in France.

It was not only at the Plantagenets’ expense that Philip enlarged the royal domain. His claim to Artois through his first marriage and his gains by the settlement of 1185–86 have been mentioned above, and he subsequently proceeded, step by step, to acquire the rest of Vermandois and Valois. His insistence on his suzerainty over vacant fiefs and on his tutelage over minors and heiresses was particularly effective with regard to Flanders, where two successive Flemish counts, Philip of Alsace (died 1191) and Baldwin IX (died c. 1205) had left no male issue.

Though he did not personally take part in the Crusade proclaimed by Pope Innocent III against a Cathari religious sect in Languedoc, Philip allowed his vassals and knights to carry it out. Simon de Montfort’s capture of Béziers and Carcassonne (1209) and his victory at Muret over Raymond VI of Toulouse and Peter II of Aragon (1213) prepared the way for the eventual annexation of eastern Languedoc to the royal domain six years after Philip’s death and for the union of northern and southern France under Capetian rule.