would have been some signs of it. His personality was that of a well-instructed, outwardly cold, because cool and calculating man, essentially receptive, afire for only one idea: the highest possible development of the French monarchy, internally and externally, as against both the secular powers and the Church. His merit was that he carried through this idea in spite of dangers to himself and to the state. A resolution once arrived at he carried out with iron obstinacy.” Certainly he was no roi fainéant. His courage at the battle of Mons-en-Pévèle was the admiration of friend and foe alike. It was against the advice of his tutor, Aegidius Colonna, that on coming to the throne he chose as his counsellors men of the legal class, and the names of his great ministers—Guillaume de Nogaret, Enguerrand de Marigny, Pierre Flotte (d. 1302)—attest the excellent quality of his judgment. He was, too, one of the few monarchs who have left to their successors reasoned programmes of reform for the state.
The new materials from the Aragonese archives, published by Finke, give the same general impression of “uncanny” reticence on Philip’s part; when other contemporary kings would have spoken he keeps silence, allowing his ministers to speak for him. Isolated passages in some of the Aragonese letters included in the collection, however, throw a new light on contemporary estimate of his character, describing him as all-powerful, as “pope and king and emperor in one person.”[1]
The reign of Philip IV. is of peculiar interest, because Of the intrusion of economic problems into the spheres of national politics and even of religion. The increased cost of government and the growing wealth of the middle class, rather than the avarice of the king and the genius of his ministers, were responsible for the genesis and direction of the new order. The greatest event of the reign was the struggle with Pope Boniface VIII. (q.v.) The pope, in his opposition to the imposition of royal taxation upon the clergy, went so far in the bull Clericis laicos of 1296 as to forbid any lay authority to demand taxes from the clergy without his consent. When Philip retaliated by a decree forbidding the exportation of any coin from France, Boniface gave u ay to save the papal dues, and the bulls issued by him in 1297 uere a decided victory for the French king. Peace between the two potentates followed until 1301. After the arrest, by Philip’s orders, of Bernard Saisset (q.v.), bishop of Pamiers, in that year, the quarrel flamed up again other causes of difference existed, and in 1302 the pope issued the bull U nam sanctam, one of the most extravagant of all statements of papal claims. To ensure the support of his people the king had called an assembly of the three estates of his kingdom at Paris in April 1302; then in the following year Guillaume de Nogaret seized the person of the pope at Anagni, an event immortalized by Dante. Boniface escaped from his captors only to die (October 11), and the short pontificate of his saintly successor, Benedict XI, was occupied in a vain effort to restore harmony to the Church. The conclave that met at Perugia on his death was divided between the partisans of the irreconcilable policy of Boniface VIII. and those of a policy of compromise with the new state theories represented by France. The election was ultimately determined by the diplomacy and the gold of Philip’s agents, and the new pope, Clement V., was the weak-willed creature of the French king, to whom he owed the tiara. When in 1309 the pope installed himself at Avignon, the new relation of the papacy and the French monarchy was patent to the world. It was the beginning of the long “Babylonish captivity” of the popes The most notable of its first-fruits was the hideous persecution of the Templars (q.v.), which began with the sudden arrest of the members of the order in France in 1307, and ended with the suppression of the order by Pope Clement at the council of Vienne in 1313.
It is now tolerably clear that Philip’s motives in this sinister proceeding were lack of money, and probably the deliberate wish to destroy a body which, with its privileged position and international financial and military organization, constituted a possible menace to the state. He had already persecuted and plundered the Jews and the Lombard bankers, and repeated recourse to the debasing of the coinage had led to a series of small risings But under his rule something was done towards systematizing the royal taxes, and, as in England. the financial needs of the king led to the association of the people in the work of government.
In 1294 Philip IV. attacked Edward I. of England, then busied with the Scottish War, and seized Guienne. Edward won over the counts of Bar and of Flanders, but they were defeated and he was obliged to make peace in 1297. Then the Flemish cities rose against the French royal officers, and utterly defeated the French army at Courtrai in 1302. The reign closed with the French position unimproved in Flanders, except for the transfer to Philip by Count Robert of Lille, Douai and Bethune, and their dependencies. Philip died on the 29th of November 1314. His wife was Jeanne, queen of Navarre (d. 1304), through whom that country passed under the rule of Philip on his marriage in 1284, three of his sons, Louis X., Philip V. and Charles IV., succeeded in turn to the throne of France, and a daughter, Isabella, married Edward II. of England.
See the Chronique of Geoffrey of Paris, edited by M. Bouquet, in vol. xxii. of the Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France. Of modern works see E. Boutaric, La France sous Philippe le Bel (1861); G. Digard, Philippe le Bel et le Saint-Siège (1900); C. V. Langlois in E. Lavisse’s Histoire de France, vol. iii. (1901); K. Wenck, Philipp der Schöne von Frankreich (Marburg, 1905); H. Finke, Papsttum und Untergang des Templerordens, 2 vols. (Münster i. W. 1907), esp. I. ch. ii.
PHILIP V. (c. 1294–1322), “the Tall,” king of France, second son of Philip the Fair and Jeanne of Navarre, received the county of Poitiers as an appanage, and was affianced when a year old to Jeanne, daughter and heiress of Otto IV., count of Burgundy. The marriage took place in 1307 when he was thirteen years of age. When his elder brother, Louis X., died, on the 5th of July
1316, leaving his second wife, Clemence of Hungary, with child, Philip was appointed regent for eighteen years by the parliament of Paris, even in the event of a male heir being born. Clemence’s son, born on the 15th of November, lived only four days, and Philip immediately proclaimed himself king, though several of the great barons declared that the rights of Jeanne, daughter of Louis X. by his first wife, Margaret of Burgundy, ought to be examined before anything else was done. The coronation at Reims, on the 9th of January 1317, took place with the gates of the city closed for fear of a surprise. The states-general of the 2nd of February 1317, consisting of the nobles, prelates, and the burgesses of Paris, approved the coronation of Philip, swore to obey him, and declared that women did not succeed to the Crown of France. The university of Paris approved this declaration, but its members did not take the oath. The Salic law was not involved, and it was later that the lawyers of the 14th century tried to connect this principle to an article of the Salic law, which accords inheritance in land (i.e. property) to males. In the Frankish law the article refers to private property, not to public law. The death of Philip’s son Louis, in 1317, disarmed the opposition of Charles, count of La Marche, who now hoped to succeed to the Crown himself. Odo or Eudes IV., duke of Burgundy, was married to Jeanne, Philip’s daughter, and received the county of Burgundy as her dower. The barons all did homage except Edward II. of England, and Philip’s position was secured. The War with Flanders, which had begun under Philip IV. the Fair, was brought to an end on the 2nd of June 1320. The revolt of the Pastoureaux who assembled at Paris in 1320 to go on a crusade was crushed by the seneschal of Carcassonne, whither they marched. One of the special objects of their hatred, the Jews, were also mulcted heavily by Philip, who extorted 150,000 livres from those of Paris alone. He died at Longchamp on the night of the 2nd of January 1322.
Philip was a lover of poetry, surrounded himself with Provençal poets and even wrote in Provençal himself, but he was also one of the most hard-working kings of the house of Capet. The
- ↑ Finke, ii. no. 78, p. 122 Anon. to the commanderies of Gardeyne and Ascho: “Pus el es rey et papa et emperador! Car tot lo mon sap, quel papa no es negun et que el fa tot ço ques vol del papa et de la esglea.”
