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| 1270 |
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| Louis's Second Crusade. Probably influenced by Charles of Anjou, who cherished far-reaching Mediterranean ambitions, Louis set out for Tunis. He died of pestilence without accomplishing anything. | 1 |
| Louis's reign was marked by rigorous insistence on inherent royal rights even at the expense of the Church, and despite episcopal protests. Royal justice was notably efficient and was constantly expanded. The right of appeal from feudal to royal courts was clearly established. The old curia regis had already become somewhat differentiated: a chambre des comptes and a parlement (high court) were already recognizable. Louis introduced the enquêteurs, itinerant investigators, to supervise the baillis andsénéchaux, but he made few other administrative innovations. Many of his diplomats, baillis, and other officials were chosen from the royal household, notably from the so-called chevaliers du roi, and from the clergy. Assemblies of royal vassals, irregularly held, gave such sanction as there was to royal policy. Louis was the first king to issue ordonnances (laws) for the whole realm on his sole authority. By ordonnance he outlawed private warfare, the carrying of arms, and trial by battle as part of the royal judicial process, and extended the royal coinage to the whole realm. By 1270 the communal movement was already in decline, and the crown profited by enforcing a more rigorous control over the towns. Only one new charter (to the port of Aigues Mortes) was granted during the reign. The bourgeois oligarchy of the towns was on increasingly bad terms with the working class, often reducing the town finances to chaos. Louis took advantage of this state of affairs to introduce a town audit (1262). The country at large was prosperous, but the financing of the two crusades and of the grandiose schemes of Charles of Anjou led to complaints that royal taxation was leading to bankruptcy, and formed a bad precedent for Philip IV. | 2 |
| A brilliant cultural advance accompanied the general material and political progress of the time of Philip II and Louis IX. Perfection of the French Gothic style: Cathedral of Chartres (c. 1194, Romanesque and Gothic); Amiens (c. 1200); Reims (1210); Louis IX's Sainte Chapelle; progress of naturalism in Gothic sculpture. University of Paris: foundation charter (1200); regulations of Innocent III (1215); endowment of Robert de Sorbon (hence, Sorbonne) in 1257. Advance of vernacular literature: Villehardouin's (d. c. 1218) Conquête de Constantinople (the first vernacular historical writing); Chrétien de Troyes and the Arthurian romances; Goliardic verse (with pagan touch); fabliaux (risqué, semirealistic bourgeois tales); Aucassin et Nicolette (a chante fable marked by irony and realism); Jean de Meun's (d. 1305) completion of William of Lorris's Roman de la Rose (a satire on the follies of all classes, especially women and clergy); Jean de Joinville's Histoire du roi Saint Louis (1309), the first vernacular classic of lay biography. Paris was the center of 13th-century philosophy: harmonization of the Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle (newly recovered during the Renaissance of the 12th century in Latin translations), with Christian orthodoxy; Vincent of Beauvais's (d. 1264) Speculum Maius (a compendium of contemporary knowledge); Albertus Magnus (a German, d. 1280), chief of the great Dominican teachers in Paris; Thomas Aquinas (an Italian, d. 1274), the pupil of Albertus Magnus. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae reconciled reason and religion, completed the integration of classical learning and Christian theology, and remains to this day the basis of Catholic theological teaching. Also at Paris was Jordanus Nemorarius (d. 1237), a German, who wrote arithmetical and geometrical treatises and worked in physics. | 3 |
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| 1270–85 |
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| PHILIP III (the Bold, so called because contemporaries considered him rash and hasty in judgment). His father's officials dominated his government. The death of Philip's uncle, Alphonse of Poitiers, brought Languedoc under royal sway and established the royal power firmly in southern France (1272). The walls of Carcassonne and Aigues Mortes were built, the latter place giving access to the Mediterranean. Unsuccessful candidacy (1273) of Charles of Anjou for the imperial crown. Crusade (1282) against the king of Aragon, Philip acting as papal champion against the successful rival of the house of Anjou in Sicily. | 4 |
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| 1281–85 |
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| The pontificate of Martin IV brought to an end an anti-French period of papal policy; papal support of Charles of Anjou's ambitious dreams of Byzantine conquest until the Sicilian Vespers (See 1268–85). There followed another period of papal opposition to French ambitions. | 5 |
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| 1285–1314 |
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| Philip the Fair, so called because of his good looks; reserved, sarcastic, cautious, pious in a formal and ritualistic sense, very conscious of his royal dignity; a “constitutional king” in that he believed himself bound by the law and precedent. He personally “controlled and directed the ordinary operations of government,” with the goal of building a sovereign state in which no territory or authority was exempt from the king's jurisdiction. Non-noble laymen lawyers, trained at Bologna and Montpellier, predominated in the expanding state bureaucracy, but nobles, most of them clergy, held the highest offices. Enquêteurs, working in pairs and with almost viceregal powers, investigated the conduct of local officials, such as the baillis and seneschals (sénéchaux); royal finances, organized in the Chambre de Comptes, superseded the feudal; appeals to the Parlement, the highest court that enforced and interpreted the law, were encouraged. | 6 |
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| 1286 |
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| Edward I of England did homage for Guienne. | 7 |
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| 1288–90 |
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| In conflicts with the cathedral chapter of Chartres and with the bishop of Poitiers, Philip pressed for and won from the Church the principle that no territory in the realm is exempt from royal jurisdiction, that all who hold judicial rights over temporal matters hold them from the king; clerical privileges were guaranteed by the king, not by the pope. The principle embodied in this victory, that the king of France was final and supreme judge in all temporal affairs in the realm, provided the royal justification for the later, more serious conflict with Pope Boniface VIII. | 8 |
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| 1293 |
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| Philip treacherously confiscated Gascony, which had been temporarily surrendered by Edward as a pledge, after a Gascon-Norman sea fight. | 9 |
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| 1294–98 |
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| War with Edward I over Guienne. Philip announced a war levy on the clergy and followed a protest with a violent anti-papal pamphlet campaign. To finance the war, Philip debased the coinage. He first made an alliance with the Scots (1295) and excluded English ships from all ports. In 1297 Edward invaded northern France, in alliance with the count of Flanders, but the war was brought to a close by a truce negotiated by Pope Boniface VIII. | 10 |
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| 1296–1303 |
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| Philip's conflict with Pope Boniface VIII. The bull Clericis laicos (1296) forbade secular rulers to levy taxes on the clergy without papal consent (See 1296). Philip retorted by forbidding the export of precious metals (a serious threat to the papal finances) and by waging a vigorous propaganda campaign. Boniface, engaged in a feud with the Colonna in Rome and absorbed in Sicilian affairs, gave way and practically annulled the bull (1297). | 11 |
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| 1297, Aug. 11 |
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| Boniface attempted to seal the peace by his canonization of Philip's grandfather Louis IX. Boniface hoped this act would inaugurate a new period of French-papal cooperation, but the quarrel resumed after the papal jubilee of 1300. | 12 |
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| 1301, Oct |
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| The arrest, probably on the enquêteurs' charge of treason, of Bernard Saisset, bishop of Pamiers, and royal seizure of his lands. | 13 |
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| 1301, Dec |
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| Boniface published the bull Ausculta fili (Listen, my son), condemning Philip's administration of his kingdom, rescinding the agreement giving Philip the right to tax the clergy, implying papal sovereignty over France, and summoning all French bishops to a council in Rome. The bull implicitly denied a principle that Philip had long stressed: that all persons, including clergy, are subject to his jurisdiction. Philip responded by summoning the first well-authenticated (April 10, 1302) Estates General of the clergy, nobility, and representatives of the towns, to win national support for his struggle with the pope. The barons and representatives of the towns wholeheartedly supported the king; the clergy, caught between two masters, asked the pope to revoke the summons to a council. Boniface retaliated with the bull (Nov. 18, 1302) Unam sanctam (one holy catholic and apostolic church) that bases papal jurisdiction over laymen on the pope's right to correct sin; the letter could also be interpreted to mean that the Roman curia had final jurisdiction over the temporal affairs of kings (See 1302–3). Boniface multiplied threats in trying to get Philip to yield. | 14 |
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