The Government Of Philip Augustus

In the thirteenth century the French kings won ascendancy over France, while France achieved political and cultural supremacy over western Europe. Based on French sources, this meticulously documented study provides an account of how Philip Augustus (1179-1223) brought about this transformation of royal power.

This is the first major study in English of the reign of Philip Augustus who ruled France from 1180 - 1223. Outshone for posterity, by his flamboyant contemporaries, the Angevin family of Henry II and his feuding sons, Philip was in fact far more successful than any of them, astutely playing them off against each other and recovering for the French crown their vast estates in Northern France including Normandy itself. As well as reasserting the power of the Capetian monarchy, he was also leader of the Third Crusade. Drawing together all the threads in the life of one of France's most forceful rulers, this new study offers a study of the nature of monarchy in late medieval Europe as well as an insight into a subtle and secretive personality.

This book makes use of vivid primary documents to provide a fascinating portrait of Paris in the year 1200: a key moment in its history, when the modern French capital was being born.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

From 1179 to 1328 relations between French Christians and Jews were chronically unstable—exploitation, repression, and expulsion were sanctioned by a government dedicated to a purified Christian state. The French Monarchy and the Jews tells in rich and compelling detail the fate of the Jews in Capetian France. William Chester Jordan assesses the relationship between "Jewish policy" and the development of royal institutions and ide­ ology in the period during which the foundations of the French state were being laid. The royal policy in the early period (the reign of Philip Augustus) was erratic. Official efforts to humiliate the Jews and ruin their businesses were alternated with attempts to provide a climate that encouraged their business while at the same time imposing economic and social disabilities that made other aspects of their lives intolerable. Louis IX, on the other hand, was single-minded in his efforts to induce the Jews to convert. Whatever the policies, Jordan attempts to measure their impact on Jewish and Christian communities. During the reign of Philip the Fair, the Jews were expelled and their property confiscated to the financial benefit of the crown. Jordan comprehensively evaluates the effects of the expulsion of the Jews themselves, especially during the first years of their exile to the principalities bordering the French king's domain. The experience of the Jews during the Middle Ages has been a subject of increasing scholarly interest, and The French Monarchy and the Jews will prove useful to any student or scholar of medieval history.

Although there is something chilling in that sad, inevitable word, the past--although in looking through the thronged rolls of history, and reading of all the dead passions, the fruitless anxieties, the vain, unproductive yearnings of beings that were once as full of thrilling life and feeling as ourselves, and now are nothing, we gain but the cold moral of our own littleness--still the very indistinctness of the distance softens and beautifies the objects of a former epoch that we thus look back upon; and in the far retrospect of the days gone by, a thousand bright and glistening spots stand out, and catch the last most brilliant rays of a sun that has long set to the multitude of smaller things around them. To none of these bright points does the light of history lend a more dazzling lustre than to the twelfth century, when the most brilliant (if it was not the most perfect) institution of modern Europe, the feudal system, rose to its highest pitch of splendour; when it incorporated with itself the noblest Order that ever the enthusiasm of man (if not his wisdom) conceived--the Order of Chivalry: and when it undertook an enterprise which, though fanatic in design, faulty in execution, and encumbered with all the multitude of frailties that enchain human endeavour, was in itself magnificent and heroic, and in its consequences grand, useful, and impulsive to the whole of Europe--the Crusades. The vast expenses, however, which the crusades required--expenses not only of that yellow dross, the unprofitable representative of earths real riches, but also expenses of invaluable time, of blood, of energy, of talent--exhausted and enfeebled every christian realm, and left, in each, the nerves of internal policy unstrung and weak, with a lassitude like that which, in the human frame, succeeds to any great and unaccustomed excitement. Although through all Europe, in that day, the relationships of lord, vassal, and serf, were the grand divisions of society, yet it was in France that the feudal system existed in its most perfect form, rising in gradual progression:--first, serfs, or villains; then vavassors, or vassals holding of a vassal; then vassals holding of a suzerain, yet possessing the right of high justice; then suzerains, great feudatories, holding of the king; and, lastly, the king himself, with smaller domains than many of his own vassals, but with a general though limited right and jurisdiction over them all. In a kingdom so constituted, the crusade, a true feudal enterprise, was, of course, followed with enthusiasm amounting to madness; and the effects were the more dreadful, as the absence of each lord implied in general the absence of all government in his domains.