Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  Richard, on the other hand, in the story so well known to generations of English schoolchildren, during his journey home fell foul of the German Emperor Henry VI, who kept him locked up for many long months in the Danube fortress of Dürrenstein, pending payment of ransom. Unfounded rumours ran round Paris that Richard had tried to poison Philippe at Acre, and even to have him assassinated in his own capital on his return. Rashly, and acting in deplorably bad faith with Richard’s evil brother John, Philippe endeavoured to bribe the Emperor with a substantial sum to continue to keep Richard under lock and key. The Emperor Henry thoughtfully revealed all to Richard, who finally reached London in March 1194. Immediately he launched a fresh war against his former friend. It was to last five years, with a continuity and intensity rare in the twelfth century.

  Much of the English King’s fighting on French soil was carried out by a particularly brutal mercenary, Mercadier, who moved with utmost speed and ruthlessness from one province to another. No quarter was given, with both sides issuing orders to blind or drown prisoners-of-war. Predictably, John switched sides as soon as his brother set foot in Normandy and surrendered Evreux, having first massacred all his French allies there. On 3 July 1194, Philippe Auguste suffered his most humiliating defeat, at Fréteval in the Vendôme, losing his baggage train, his treasury and the national archives. To bottle Philippe up in Paris and to prevent him from ever again threatening Normandy, Richard constructed an unassailable fortress at Château Gaillard on a key bend in the Seine, still a most imposing castle commanding the approaches to Paris. Defeat followed defeat for Philippe. Swayed by Richard’s superior diplomatic skill, the Emperor Henry also joined in against Philippe, announcing his intention of annexing the right bank of the Rhône.

  By the end of 1198, it looked as if France would be sliced up once again and become a fiefdom of either Richard or the Emperor. Once again, intervention from afar saved the day. After news had come from Spain that the Moors were threatening a new invasion, the new Pope, Innocent III, applied irresistible pressure to the combatants to reach a truce. The results were extremely tough on Philippe, obliging him to forfeit all of Normandy save the citadel of Gisors—on which as a nine-year-old he had first set eyes—and with it he in effect lost all the fruits of his campaigning over the previous ten years. Had he died at this point, he would have been remembered with scorn as a historical nobody, and it seemed it would be only a matter of time before Richard renewed the war, with a final drive on Paris.

  Then the two sides’ fortunes were abruptly reversed. While besieging a rebel fortress in Limousin with the dread Mercadier on 26 March 1199, Richard was wounded in the left shoulder by a bolt from a crossbow. Gangrene set in, and the warrior-king soon died. All the defenders of the besieged city were hanged, but—just before he died—Richard with a last chivalrous gesture requested that his assailant be spared and given a sum of money. The moment he was dead, however, Mercadier had the sharpshooter flayed alive and impaled. “King Richard is dead, and a thousand years have passed since there died a man whose loss was so great,” sang the troubadours. In Paris, Philippe Auguste no doubt heaved a sigh of relief. Now there would be only weak, evil and hated Jean-Sans-Terre to deal with.

  * He had been joint king for the last year of his father’s life.

  THE PAPAL ROLE

  All through Capetian France’s struggles against the Plantagenets, Louis VII and his son had to contend with a powerful, and often unpredictable, player on the sidelines. Stalin’s sneering question to Churchill during the Second World War—“How many divisions has the Pope?”—would have been answered in the twelfth century with “a great many.” At the wave of the papal crucifix, or with the despatch of a legate, each pope could summon up armies and nations to bring pressure to bear on miscreant rulers. In the Middle Ages, thoughts of death and eternal damnation were uppermost in all people’s minds. Upon the spiritual state of grace at the moment of death depended happiness, or misery, for the whole of eternity. Though by the later Middle Ages views on the afterlife had lost some of their certainty, in the twelfth century notions of Purgatory were little considered; it was a straight choice between the Bosom of Abraham and the Cauldron of Hell. Such was the dread of eternal damnation, such the dread of excommunication or an “interdict” upon a whole nation, that the mere threat could reverse policies or even overturn thrones. Perhaps never again would the power and influence of the Pope be greater.

  Manipulating and conspiring on the international scene, some pontiffs resembled a Metternich or a Bismarck of their times. The Pope at the time of Philippe’s accession was Alexander III, a vigorous reformer who strongly supported Becket’s stand against royal encroachment on Church matters, and who did much to consolidate papal authority throughout Europe. Several popes later came Innocent III—there was a certain irony in the name—who had his finger on every pulse within the Church, and influence everywhere in the Christian world. With their authority challenged by the hostility of the Hohenstaufen Holy Roman emperors and by an array of four imperial anti-popes, these medieval pontiffs found themselves constrained to juggle alliances with England and France with often bewildering rapidity—as has already been seen.

  Philippe’s father had fallen into (temporary) papal displeasure through his divorcing Eleanor, but it was nothing compared to the trouble that overtook Philippe himself. His first wife, Isabelle of Hainault, who had brought him Artois, died aged only nineteen. In 1193 he entered into another politically adroit union with Ingeborg of Denmark, a pretty girl of eighteen. But no sooner had the unfortunate Ingeborg arrived in France than Philippe mysteriously seemed seized of a total and irremediable aversion to her. He tried to persuade King Knut to have her back; the King refused, and complained to the Vatican. Philippe divorced Ingeborg, who—after a spell in prison—was placed in a French convent, and three years later he bigamously married a Bavarian princess, Agnes of Merano.

  One of the first acts of Innocent III was to declare in 1198, “The Holy See cannot abandon persecuted women without defending them.” He ordered the divorce annulled and a remarriage, under threat of personal excommunication of the King and Agnes, and of an interdict on the whole kingdom of France. The interdict was enforced in that year, to the deep distress of Philippe’s subjects. Finally, after nine months of resistance, during which time Philippe Auguste had actually gone so far as to give the Papal Legate his papers to leave the country, he submitted on all counts. Ingeborg was reinstated and Agnes chased off, and in September 1200 the interdict was lifted—with Innocent III going so far in the pursuit of reconciliation as to legitimize Agnes’s children.

  To his discredit, however, Philippe Auguste was being rather less than honest. He sequestered Ingeborg, first in a château in the Forest of Rambouillet, then under house-arrest at Etampes, while Agnes remained in France, set up by Philippe in a château nearer to Paris. A solution seemed to be presented by the death of Agnes in 1201. Nevertheless, for several years of interminable negotiations between King and Pope, the unfortunate Ingeborg was kept in this wretched state. France and the Vatican came close to rupture once again; but, politically, they needed each other. Then, suddenly, in 1212, Philippe announced that he was going to take Ingeborg back as his queen, if not as his wife. There was relief in the Vatican, and great celebrations in Paris and in the nation at large. But, as usual with Philippe Auguste, the considerations were purely political. He had decided to administer the coup de grâce to King John and to invade England, and for that he needed the support of Ingeborg’s brother, the King of Denmark, and—above all—of the Pope.

  The distasteful story of Ingeborg illustrated just how far the power of the Capetian monarchy had reached under Philippe Auguste, to the point where he could openly defy and out-manoeuvre that most powerful pontiff, Innocent III, over a period of many years when all the faults were manifestly on his side. It also demonstrated the single-minded stubbornness of his character, and the fear that he was able to inspire.

  By 1213, King Joh
n had fallen into every trap laid for him by Philippe, political and military. By refusing to heed a summons to attend a court of adjudication in Paris, in his capacity as Duc d’Aquitaine, he gave Philippe a pretext to declare his fiefdoms forfeit and to renew war against him. By his cruelties John had progressively alienated the sympathies of his subjects in France, and Philippe had already taken from him Rouen, the Angevin capital in France, followed by the whole of Normandy—which meant the end of Henry II’s short-lived Angevin Empire. It looked as if Philippe had all the chips: the Pope, the Danish fleet and the Emperor, and he had also seized from John Touraine, Brittany, Maine and Anjou. In 1213 John fell foul of Innocent III for rejecting Stephen Langton as archbishop of Canterbury, and was placed under an interdict, with Philippe openly invited to invade, to remove John’s crown and place it on the head “of someone who would be worthy.” Philippe had a candidate—his son and heir, Louis—and had already been at work subverting the Welsh and Irish against John as well as some of the English barons. According to a French chronicler, he awoke one morning exclaiming, “God, why am I waiting when I should just go out and conquer the English?” In fact, his preparations had been carefully laid. In the only serious attempt at invasion between William the Conqueror and Napoleon, a fleet of 1,500 sails and an immense army were assembled in the Channel ports in May 1213.

  Then, just as Philippe was about to embark on this tremendous enterprise, two weeks later came the devastating news that Innocent—perhaps still mistrusting the wayward King, and eager to show his claws—had reversed his policy yet again, and had become reconciled to a humbled John, who was now ready to comply with all the Pope’s demands. Philippe was ordered to pull back.

  THE BELLUM

  For a spell, the skies looked dark for Philippe yet again. At the beginning of July 1214 John himself attacked in Aquitaine, threatening Philippe from the south-west and drawing Prince Louis down to meet him in Anjou, while his allies (including John’s nephew Otto IV of Brunswick, the Holy Roman Emperor) launched their main effort in Flanders. Aged twenty-six, the future Louis VIII, based in Chinon, managed to defeat John and an army three times the size of his own at Roche-au-Moine, close to Angers. Philippe was gratified by his heir’s success, but the main threat to France lay in the north on the plain of Flanders, close to Lille, where Otto and his allies had concentrated a force of 80,000 men and 1,500 knights—a massive army for those days—ready to advance southwards on Paris. Philippe could muster no more than 25,000 men, of whom 500 were chevaliers. His infantry included, for the first time, a substantial body of bourgeois Communes, regarded as a great novelty, who were to play a role of historic significance.

  In the twelfth century, military operations were divided into two kinds, guerra and bellum. Guerra was normal warfare usually fought around castles, for immediate goals and with inconclusive results. In contrast, a bellum sought to obtain a definitive decision with important objectives. As a wager of total victory or loss, it was regarded as a judgement of God. France had not risked a proper bellum against her adversaries since 1119, a hundred years previously, when Philippe’s grandfather Louis VI had been decisively defeated by Henry I of England at Brémule. Now, as the rival forces manoeuvred into position in Flanders, both Philippe and Otto decided to risk all on one throw, to fight a true pitched battle, and opted for a bellum.

  The news reaching Otto’s camp of John’s defeat at Roche-au-Moine, coupled with the realization that he could not expect his intervention in the battle, must have been demoralizing. But by now events had acquired their own momentum. Philippe was heading for Lille along the road that traversed the Marcq at the key bridge of the hamlet of Bouvines, when he was intercepted by the vanguard of Otto’s army. The bridge lay in a position of prime geographic importance, the only crossing point in a swampy area, and the meeting point of French, Flemish and imperial territories. The high ground on either side offered good hard-going for cavalry. But an important consideration caused both kings to hesitate before facing battle: it was then 27 July, a Sunday, on which Christians were forbidden to fight.

  When the French rearguard spotted the allies in full battle array, Brother Guérin, Bishop-elect of Senlis, proposed that the King draw up his lines to meet the enemy. He was outvoted by the rest of the counsellors, who thought that the allies were moving on to Tournai and would not fight on a Sunday. The good sense behind Guérin’s judgement was confirmed, however, when the French rearguard reported fierce attacks. The final decision to engage the imperial forces was supposedly taken while Philippe was resting, exhausted by the heat, with his armour off, under the shade of an ash tree. In short order, the King performed the requisite rituals to consecrate the forthcoming encounter as a true bellum.

  It was the canicule, or dog-days of summer, and 27 July was a day of intense heat, dreadful for knights in heavy armour, fighting half blinded by the sweat cascading down inside their helmets, with a heavy dust kicked up by the thousands of horses. The course of the battle evolved in three sectors, with the French right wing being the first to engage, then the centre, and finally the left, Bishop Guérin beginning the action on the right with a sally by mounted sergeants from the Abbey of Saint-Médard—his success in this part of the battlefield preserving Philippe’s main army from the serious danger of being turned and pushed back into the swamps of the Marcq. In the centre, however, during one cavalry mêlée, which fully occupied the French knights, the imperial sergeants were able to break through the lines of the Communes footsoldiers drawn up in formation in front of the King. Striking back at them, Philippe became briefly separated from his bodyguard and was unhorsed by the enemy infantry using long hooks. Hurling themselves on the helpless King, Otto’s men tried in vain to find a chink in his coat-of-mail through which to thrust a fatal dagger. In these brief seconds the whole history of France hung in the balance. However, his heavy armour and a quick response from the knights of the King’s household, who threw themselves down protectively upon him, saved Philippe’s life. They gave him a fresh horse and conducted him to safety.

  The imperial attack was matched by a French counterattack that equally imperilled Emperor Otto’s life. In the end, four imperial knights succeeded in conveying the Emperor to safety, although they themselves were captured. Otto now galloped off the battlefield, hardly stopping until he had reached his base camp at Valenciennes, thirty kilometres away. The battered imperial insignia, with Otto’s fear-inducing great eagle mounted above a dragon and borne on a four-wheeled chariot, were however triumphantly presented to King Philippe, and then transported to Paris along with captives and booty.

  Guérin, whose victories on the right wing had enabled him to pass to the left, helped achieve success there too. By five o’clock, the fighting was all but over, having lasted no more than a few hours. Philippe’s triumph was complete. The military leadership of the coalition were incarcerated, some at Philippe’s newly built tower of the Louvre outside his city-walls, thus effectively dissolving John’s coalition against his French rival.

  The victory at Bouvines prompted waves of spontaneous rejoicing throughout the realm: the populace danced, the clergy chanted, and bells were rung. Flowers and branches festooned churches and houses and carpeted the streets of towns and villages. Peasants and harvesters shouldered their scythes and rakes, leaving ripened crops, and rushed instead to see the captives led to Paris in chains, and to join the townsmen and grandees in greeting the King. Bishop Guérin headed the procession into Paris, singing canticles and hymns, as the King walked behind.

  At various crises in French history, propagandists would dust off the victory of Bouvines and recycle it as a touchstone of national faith. At the time of Louis-Philippe’s bourgeois monarchy in 1840, Bouvines would be trotted out as the first true victory of king and “people.” In the run-up to the First World War, it would be evoked as a glorious feat of French over German arms. Since 1945, if it is referred to at all, it is chiefly as a victory over les Anglo-Saxons. Though it hardly rates in Engl
ish history books as a decisive battle, Bouvines was an outstanding victory. In purely military terms, it represented a triumph of mobility and superior morale.

  Philippe was now forty-nine, with another nine years left to reign. For him, in Paris, victory at Bouvines meant a remarkable reconciliation between the three orders of King, Church and nobles. Never before had a French monarch been so secure on his throne, or France so secure in Europe. Philippe Auguste found himself master of France, and France in the first rank among European states. He had fought, and won, the first truly national war in French history. Bouvines was a kind of Valmy of the Middle Ages, a victory not only of the King and his knights, but of the King and the common people. With it the French first became conscious of being a nation—and Paris of being a capital, increasingly the administrative heart of that nation.

  TWO

  * * *

  Capital City

  The two nations set off in different directions. England headed towards liberty, France towards absolutism.

  ERNEST LAVISSE, HISTOIRE DE FRANCE, III, P. 202

  THE GREAT WALL

  Unforeseen—and unforeseeable—at the time, the consequences of le dimanche de Bouvines in July 1214 were immense: for both France and England, for the future shape of Europe and, not least, for the city of Paris. Enraged by the lost battle and exasperated by all the past wickedness of their own king, now truly Jean-Sans-Terre, the English barons rose up and forced him to sign the Magna Carta at Runnymede in April the following year. And in a treaty once more imposed by the Pope, John agreed at Chinon to pay reparations and implicitly to accept the French conquests in Anjou, Brittany and Poitou. In marked contrast, for the last nine years of his life Philippe himself was to fight no more battles. Instead he concentrated his prodigious energies on reasserting the power of his personal rule, reforming his government and reconstructing his capital. The conduct of war, now on the peripheries of his hugely expanded domain, he left to his son and heir, Louis, who was able to act with a remarkable degree of independence.