If the policies of Philip the Fair evoked the complaint of all classes of people, it was because he had favoured none in particular; in fact, except in war and finance, the later Capetians may be said to have maintained a traditional politics toward both the nobles and the towns. With the church, however, it was otherwise. Philip the Fair’s insistence on taxing the clergy for defense led immediately to his conflict with Boniface VIII" class="md-crosslink">Pope Boniface VIII. The latter, in the bull Clericis laicos (1296), forbade the payment of taxes by clergymen to lay rulers without papal consent. Boniface had some support in the south, but Philip outmaneuvered the pope by prohibiting the export of bullion from France. The following year the pope abandoned his position and conceded to kings the right to tax the clergy without papal approval in time of need.
The quarrel was renewed in 1301, when the king and the magnates accused the bishop of Pamiers of treason and heresy. Boniface not only revoked the concessions of 1297 but rebuked Philip for seizing clerical property and debasing the coinage, among other things, and he summoned French prelates to Rome to proceed with a reform of the kingdom. Once again the clergy were split; many bishops and abbots attended an assembly at Paris in 1302 where they joined men of the other estates in addressing a remonstrance to the pope. A year later the king adopted rougher tactics: in June 1303 many prelates acquiesced in a scheme to try the pope before a general council, and in September the king’s envoy Guillaume de Nogaret and his accomplices seized Boniface at Anagni. Rescued by the Romans, the aged pope died a month later. Upon his death the papal monarchy that had been erected over the preceding two centuries collapsed entirely. The Gascon pope Clement V (reigned 1305–14) moved the Holy See to Avignon, and a mass of his compatriots were appointed cardinals.
With this pliant pontiff, the way was cleared for the strangest act of violence of the reign of Philip the Fair—the destruction of the Templars" class="md-crosslink">Knights Templars. Founded in the 12th century, the Templars were an important Crusading order whose privileges seemed poorly justified after the fall of the last Crusader outpost in the Holy Land. The Templars remained an influential order, however, whose great wealth and power attracted Philip’s attention. In 1307 Philip ordered the arrest of every Templar in France and the seizure of their goods and property because of alleged heresy and immorality. Under torture, the Templars confessed to homosexual practices, spitting on the cross, idol worship, and other things. In 1310 many of the Templars recanted their confessions, but Philip proceeded in his quest against them and in 1312 persuaded the pope to formally suppress the order. Their last leaders were imprisoned for life, and the two highest-ranking authorities were burned at the stake. Foreign relations
France assumed a more active role in the politics of Christian Europe from the end of the 12th century. The most heavily populated region of Europe, the kingdom of France provided its rulers with greater resources than any of their rivals. Philip Augustus led French contingents on the most fully international of the great Crusades (1190–91), although, having once demonstrated his energy in that work of piety, he could not afterward be persuaded to renew his vow. He preferred, through dynastic schemes and opportunism, to pursue his rivalry with the Plantagenets. His ambition seems to have embraced England as early as 1193, when he married Ingeborg, whose brother, the king of Denmark, had an old claim to the throne of England. When Philip, for private reasons, repudiated Ingeborg the day after the wedding and sought to have the marriage annulled, she and her brother appealed to the pope; her case, punctuated by reconciliations with Philip dictated more by policy than by sentiment, dragged on through the pontificate of Innocent III.
Meanwhile, in 1200, Philip’s son Louis married Blanche of Castile, granddaughter of Henry II, through whom another claim to England was heralded. Louis’s career as prince was marked by aggressive designs against John" class="md-crosslink">King John. Innocent III was prepared to recognize Louis as king of England in 1213; and the policy was dropped only after Louis’s abortive invasion of 1216–17.
It was in the play of rival coalitions that Philip Augustus had his greatest diplomatic anxiety and success. Philip countered John’s alliance with Otto IV of Brunswick, his nephew and claimant to the empire, by supporting a second claimant, Philip of Swabia. When Otto became Holy Roman emperor in 1209 and the counts of Flanders and Boulogne were alienated from their Capetian suzerain, Philip found himself seriously threatened in his northern heartlands. John’s desire to avenge the loss of his French fiefs finally prompted him to act in 1214; he led a force from the west, and his major allies marched on Paris from the north. Philip Augustus met the allied forces at Bouvines in July 1214 and won a decisive victory. As John retreated and his coalition collapsed, there could be no doubt that Capetian France had achieved hegemony in Christian Europe.
Louis IX acted astutely, though in ways unlike his grandfather’s, to preserve the prestige of France. His treaties with Aragon and England, designed to extend and secure his domains, resulted from a cordiality better appreciated abroad than by the royal counselors. From Navarra and Lorraine as well as from within the realm were brought disputes for his judgment; and in the Mise of Amiens (1264) Louis responded to the appeal of Henry III and the English barons to pronounce on the validity of the Provisions of Oxford (a written agreement between the king and magnates in England to reform the state of the realm). But the more absorbing issues of Louis’s diplomacy lay in the east. He resisted papal urgings to take sides against Otto’s successor, Frederick II, believing in the equal legitimacy of empire and papacy. On the other hand, he allowed his brother Charles I of Anjou to accept the crown of Sicily from the pope; for this enterprise, as well as for his own Crusades, he allowed the papacy to tax the French clergy. His paramount foreign interest was to recover the holy places of Christ, a traditional ambition characteristically associated in his mind with the hope of converting the infideclass="underline" the Mongols or the emir of Tunis.
Louis IX first took the cross in 1244, upon learning that a Turkish-Egyptian coalition had driven the Christians of the Levant back to precarious coastal positions. His expedition, which was well planned and well financed, set out in 1248, only to founder in the plague-ridden floodwaters of Egypt a year and a half later. Louis himself was captured; upon his release he spent four years in Syria in support of the Christian cause. He renewed his Crusader’s vow in 1267, in circumstances clouded by Angevin-Sicilian politics. Charles, whose inordinate Mediterranean ambitions had little in common with the traditional Crusade, secretly persuaded the new expedition to divert to Tunis. It broke up there with the king’s death in 1270.
The prestige of France in Christendom lost little from these failures of Louis IX. Nor was it generally foreseen that Aquitaine and Sicily would become battlegrounds in the future. The apparent strength of his father’s diplomacy deterred Philip III from changing it, even though circumstances had changed. When in 1282 the misrule of Charles of Anjou caused the Sicilians to revolt in favour of Peter III of Aragon, leading to the War of the Sicilian Vespers, a test of the Angevin policy could no longer be deferred. Charles’s friend Martin IV" class="md-crosslink">Pope Martin IV (reigned 1281–85) excommunicated the king of Aragon and offered the vacant throne to Philip for one of his sons. Because at this juncture the crown of Navarra was destined for Philip’s son and successor, Philip the Fair, the whole Spanish March seemed ripe for recovery by the French. Yet the Crusade against Aragon, blatantly political and impractical, came to a catastrophic end: the king himself died as his battered forces staggered out of Catalonia (October 1285). Charles of Anjou and Martin IV also died in 1285. Understandably, Philip the Fair, who had foreseen the folly of the ill-conceived attack on Aragon, no longer permitted Mediterranean concerns to dominate foreign policy. The issue over Sicily dragged on, but minor Capetian interests in the Pyrenees and in Castile were allowed to lapse.