[987 - 1453] The Medieval Kingdom of France

Our story begins in the year 987. The last of Charlemagne’s great line is dead, and the powerful nobles of the land we now call France gather to choose a new king. They do not choose a mighty warrior or a wealthy duke. Instead, their choice falls upon Hugh Capet, a man whose personal lands are a modest patch around Paris and Orléans, a mere island in a sea of powerful, near-independent duchies. His title, King of the Franks, is grand, but his power is fragile, a flickering candle in a vast, dark hall. The great Dukes of Normandy, Aquitaine, and Burgundy command more land and more swords than he. For them, the king is merely the first among equals, and not a very impressive first at that. This is the starting point of a centuries-long struggle, the slow, often violent, and incredibly tenacious fight of one family to turn a title into a kingdom.

The Capetian dynasty that Hugh founded would prove remarkably resilient. For over three hundred years, from 987 to 1328, an unbroken line of fathers passed the crown to their sons. This “Capetian Miracle” provided a stability that was the envy of Europe. Slowly, patiently, they played a masterful game of political chess. It was Philip II, known as Augustus, who truly transformed the game. Reigning from 1180, he was a cunning, tireless monarch who saw the powerful English Plantagenet kings, who controlled more of France than he did, as his ultimate rivals. In 1214, at the Battle of Bouvines, Philip won a staggering victory against a coalition of English, Flemish, and German forces. The clash was a maelstrom of steel, charging destriers, and desperate courage. When the dust settled, Philip’s authority was unquestioned. He had tripled the royal domain and laid the administrative foundations of a true state, replacing feudal loyalty with paid bailiffs and seneschals who answered only to the crown.

If Philip Augustus built the kingdom with steel, his grandson Louis IX forged it with piety and justice. Known to history as Saint Louis, he was the ideal of the Christian monarch. He famously held court beneath an oak tree at Vincennes, listening to the petitions of his poorest subjects as readily as his richest barons. He funded magnificent building projects, including the breathtaking Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, a chapel designed to look like a colossal jewel box, its stone walls almost entirely replaced by over 1,100 scenes in soaring stained glass. This was the age of Gothic architecture, a revolution of engineering that allowed builders to chase the heavens with pointed arches, ribbed vaults, and flying buttresses, flooding once-dark naves with divine light. Yet, Louis’s piety also drove him on two disastrous crusades to the Holy Land, massive expeditions that cost him dearly in treasure and eventually, his life. He died of dysentery outside Tunis in 1270, a martyr for a cause that was already fading.

While Louis IX looked to heaven, his grandson Philip IV, “the Fair,” was a man ruthlessly focused on earthly power. Cold, calculating, and relentlessly ambitious, he embodied a new, more impersonal form of kingship. He needed money to fund his wars and his expanding bureaucracy, and he would stop at nothing to get it. This led him into a direct and brutal conflict with the papacy, but his most infamous act was the utter destruction of the Knights Templar. On Friday, October 13, 1307, his agents carried out a coordinated, kingdom-wide arrest of every Templar, from the Grand Master Jacques de Molay down to the humblest brother. Accused of heresy through confessions extracted by horrific torture, their vast wealth was confiscated by the crown. When de Molay was burned at the stake in Paris in 1314, legend claims he cursed Philip IV and the Pope, summoning them to God’s judgment. Whether a curse or coincidence, both men were dead within the year.

Beneath these royal dramas, the lives of the ninety percent of the population who worked the land continued in a rhythm dictated by the seasons. The social order was rigid, divided into three estates: those who prayed (the clergy), those who fought (the nobility), and those who worked. For a peasant, or serf, life was a cycle of back-breaking labor. Bound to the lord’s manor, you owed him a share of your crop and days of service, plowing his fields with the new, heavy ploughs that turned the rich northern soil, or harvesting his grain. Your world was small, perhaps only the few miles around your village. Your diet was monotonous—bread, porridge, and whatever you could grow in a small garden. Yet, this era also saw the slow re-emergence of towns and cities. Paris swelled, becoming the largest city in Christendom, its intellectual heart the University of Paris, where scholars debated theology and philosophy. Great trade fairs in the Champagne region brought merchants from Italy and the Low Countries, their wagons laden with silks, spices, and wool, weaving France back into the economic fabric of Europe.

In 1328, the Capetian Miracle ended. King Charles IV died without a son, extinguishing the direct male line. A crisis erupted. The French nobles chose Philip of Valois, a cousin, to be King Philip VI. But another claimant had a stronger, if more complicated, case: King Edward III of England, whose mother was a French princess. In 1337, Edward pressed his claim, igniting the conflict that would become known as the Hundred Years’ War. The early decades were an unmitigated disaster for France. At Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356, the flower of French chivalry, knights encased in plate armor and bound by codes of individual glory, charged headlong into disciplined formations of English and Welsh longbowmen. The sky would darken with a storm of bodkin-tipped arrows that could pierce armor, cutting down men and horses in screaming, chaotic heaps. The French king himself was captured at Poitiers, and the kingdom plunged into anarchy.

As if war were not enough, a far more terrifying enemy arrived in 1348. The Black Death, carried by fleas on rats aboard merchant ships, swept through France with unimaginable speed and lethality. It was a phantom menace that no one understood. People went to bed healthy and were dead by morning, their bodies marked by the dark swellings, or buboes, that gave the plague its name. Within a few years, between a third and a half of the entire population was dead. The social fabric tore apart. Fields went fallow, villages were abandoned, and a profound sense of despair and religious terror gripped the survivors. The world seemed to be ending.

The kingdom staggered on, but the worst was yet to come. In 1415, the young and brilliant English King Henry V invaded. At Agincourt, on a rain-soaked, muddy field, a small, exhausted English army annihilated a vastly larger French force. It was Crécy all over again, but worse. The French nobility was butchered. Within years, Henry V had conquered Normandy and, through the Treaty of Troyes, been named the heir to the French throne. The King of France’s son, the Dauphin Charles, was a disinherited fugitive ruling a rump state south of the Loire River. The kingdom of France was on the verge of extinction.

And then, a second miracle. In 1429, a seventeen-year-old peasant girl from a remote village appeared at the Dauphin’s court. Her name was Joan. She claimed to hear the voices of saints commanding her to drive the English out and see the true king crowned. In an act of desperation, Charles gave her command of his army. What followed is the stuff of legend. Clad in white armor and carrying a banner, Joan of Arc’s unshakeable faith electrified the demoralized French soldiers. She led them to an incredible victory, breaking the English siege of Orléans. She then led the Dauphin deep into enemy territory to the city of Reims, the traditional site of coronations, where he was finally crowned King Charles VII. Though she was captured by allies of the English a year later and burned at the stake as a heretic in 1431, her intervention had changed everything. She had given the French a cause, a symbol, and a burgeoning sense of national identity.

Joan’s spirit lived on. Charles VII, now a legitimate king, slowly rebuilt his power. His armies, modernized and equipped with powerful new cannons that could shatter castle walls, began to push the English back. The final act came in 1453 at the Battle of Castillon, where French artillery routed the last English field army. After more than a century of bloodshed, the war was over. The Medieval Kingdom of France had survived its darkest hour. It was scarred, depopulated, and traumatized, but it was also forged anew. The fractious, independent nobles had been weakened, and the power of the king, now commanding a standing army and a sense of national purpose, was greater than ever before. The realm of Hugh Capet, once a tiny island of royal authority, now stood as the most powerful and unified kingdom in Europe, ready to step out of the Middle Ages and into the dawn of the Renaissance.