French II

Who Were the French?

In 987, when the assembled magnates of West Francia chose Hugh Capet as their king, no one in the room would have called himself French in the way a later century would understand the word. The kingdom was a name on parchment more than a thing on the ground. Its great lords, the dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine, the counts of Flanders and Toulouse, ran their own affairs and answered the king only when it suited them. Yet over the next three centuries, something genuinely new took shape between the Channel and the Mediterranean: a kingdom that thought of itself as a single body, with Paris at its head, a common high culture in the langue d'oïl, and a king who claimed to be more than just the first among his peers.

Homeland and Way of Life

The land was generous by medieval standards. Wheat grew well in the broad northern plains around Paris, Reims, and Chartres; vineyards spread up the slopes of Burgundy and the Loire; the south kept its olives, its almonds, and its older Roman habits. The climate was kinder than it would be later, and the warmer centuries from about 1000 to 1300 saw forests cleared, marshes drained, and new villages founded by the thousand. Plows grew heavier, harnesses better, and three-field rotation spread across the north, so the same land fed more people. Towns that had been little more than walled markets in the year 1000 became real cities by 1200. Paris, modest and muddy when Hugh Capet was crowned, was the largest city in Latin Christendom three centuries later, with a university that drew students from Scotland to Sicily.

Warfare, Power, and Limits

War was the trade of the nobility and the slow business of the king. The mounted knight, armored, expensively trained, and bound to his lord by oaths and land, was the centerpiece of any serious army, and France produced him in greater numbers and finer quality than anywhere else in Europe. French knights crusaded in the Holy Land, fought the Moors in Spain, and carved out new lordships in Sicily and the Levant. At home, the Capetian kings spent their first century or so simply trying to control the lands a few days' ride from Paris. The turning point was Philip Augustus, who at the start of the thirteenth century stripped the Plantagenet kings of England of Normandy, Anjou, and most of their continental holdings in a single brutal decade. His grandson Louis IX, later a saint, ruled a kingdom that finally looked like one. The limits showed in 1337, when an old quarrel over Gascony and the French throne itself opened the long war with England that would consume the next century.

Beliefs, Customs, and Society

France in this period was the workshop of Latin Christianity. The reform movements that remade the western Church, Cluny in the tenth century, Cîteaux in the twelfth, the Dominicans and Franciscans in the thirteenth, all either began on French soil or found their fullest expression there. The cathedrals went up one after another in a building boom without parallel: Saint-Denis, Chartres, Notre-Dame de Paris, Amiens, Reims, each taller and lighter than the last as masons learned to hang stone from pointed arches and flying buttresses. The same century produced troubadour poetry in the south, the chansons de geste in the north, and the first universities, where logic and theology were argued with a fierceness that would have astonished an earlier age. It also produced the Albigensian Crusade, in which northern French armies crushed the Cathar heresy and, with it, much of the independent culture of Languedoc. Faith and force were rarely far apart.

Contacts, Conflicts, and Legacy

France lay at the heart of the medieval West and touched almost everything in it. Norman adventurers from its northern coast conquered England in 1066 and Sicily soon after, carrying French speech and French habits with them. French knights led most of the early crusades and ruled the Latin states of the eastern Mediterranean for nearly two centuries. French scholars taught in Bologna and Oxford; French money paid for cathedrals from the Rhine to the Ebro; French fashions in dress, in poetry, and in courtly manners set the tone for noble life across Europe. By 1337, the kingdom that Hugh Capet had inherited as a near fiction was the largest, richest, and most populous in Latin Christendom. The wars with England that followed would test it almost to destruction, but the idea of France as a single country, with a single king, a single capital, and a single people, was already firmly in place.