'Philip IV' (
1268 –
November 29,
1314), called 'the Fair' (
French: ''le Bel''), son and successor of
Philip III, reigned as
King of France from
1285 until his death. He was the husband of
Joan I of Navarre, by virtue of which he was
King of Navarre (as 'Philip I') and
Count of Champagne from
1284 to
1305.
Youth
A member of the
House of Capet, Philip was born at the
Palace of Fontainebleau at
Seine-et-Marne, the son of
King Philip III and
Isabella of Aragon. Philip was nicknamed ''the Fair'' (''le Bel'') because of his handsome appearance, but his inflexible personality gained him other epithets, from friend and foe alike. His fierce opponent
Bernard Saisset,
bishop of Pamiers, said of him, "He is neither man nor beast. This is a statue"
[1]
His education was guided by
Guillaume d'Ercuis the
almoner of his father.
As prince, just before his father's death, he negotiated the safe passage of the royal family out of
Aragon after the unsuccessful
Aragonese Crusade.
Consolidation of the royal demesne
As a king, Philip was determined to strengthen the
monarchy at any cost. He relied, more than any of his predecessors, on a professional
bureaucracy of legalists. Because to the public he kept aloof and left specific policies, especially unpopular ones, to his ministers, he was called a "useless owl" by his contemporaries. His reign marks the French transition from a charismatic monarchy – which could all but collapse in an incompetent reign – to a bureaucratic kingdom, a move towards modernity.
Philip married queen
Jeanne of Navarre (
1271–
1305) on
August 16,
1284. The primary administrative benefit of this was the inheritance of Jeanne in
Champagne and
Brie, which were adjacent to the royal
demesne in Ile-de-France and became thus effectively united to the king's own lands, forming an expansive area. During the reigns of Jeanne herself, and her three sons (1284–1328), these lands belonged to the person of the king; but by 1328 they had become so entrenched in the royal domain that king Philip VI of France (who was not an heir of Jeanne) switched lands with the then rightful heiress,
Joan II of Navarre, with the effect that Champagne and Brie remained part of the royal demesne and Joan received compensation with lands in western Normandy.
The Kingdom of
Navarre in the Pyrenees was not so important to contemporary interests of the French crown. It remained in personal union 1284–1329, after which it went its separate way. Philippe gained
Lyon for France in 1312.
Contacts with the Mongols
Philip had various contacts with the
Mongol power in the Middle East, who were trying to obtain the cooperation of Christian powers to fight against the Muslims. He received the embassy of the Mongolian Chinese monk
Rabban Bar Sauma, and an elephant as a present.
[2]. Philip seemingly responded positively to the request of the embassy:
Philip also gave the embassy numerous present, and sent one of his noblemen, Gobert de Helleville, to accompany Bar Sauma back to Mongol lands:
Gobert de Helleville departed on February 2, 1288, with two clercs Robert de Senlis and Guillaume de Bruyères, as well as arbaletier Audin de Bourges. They joined Bar Sauma in Rome, and accompanied him to Persia.
[3]
The Mongol ruler
Arghun, based in
Baghdad, further wrote to him a letter in 1289, in answer to a letter sent by Philip to him in 1288,
[4] specifically outlining military cooperation:
Extract of the letter of Arghun to Philip IV, in the
Uyghur script, dated 1289. French National Archives.
Contrary to
Saint Louis, Philip apparently did not pursue with such military plans in the Middle East in the form of a
Crusade. He did however organize a military collaboration with the Mongols through the
Knights Templar and their leader
Jacques de Molay against the Mamluks. The plan was to coordinate actions between the
Christian military orders, the King of Cyprus, the
aristocracy of Cyprus and
Little Armenia and the Mongols of the
khanate of
Ilkhan (
Persia). In 1298 or 1299, Jacques de Molay halted a Mamluk invasion with military force in Armenia possibly because of the loss of
Roche-Guillaume, the last Templar stronghold in Cilicia, to the Mamluks. However, when the Mongol
khan of Persia,
Ghâzân, defeated the Mamluks in the
Battle of Wadi al-Khazandar in December 1299, the Christian forces were not ready to take an advantage of the situation.
In 1300, Jacques de Molay made his order commit raids along the
Egyptian and
Syrian coasts to weaken the enemy's supply lines as well as to harass them, and in November that year he joined the occupation of the tiny fortress island of
Ruad (today called
Arwad) which faced the Syrian town of
Tortosa. The intent was to establish a bridgehead in accordance with the Mongol alliance, but the Mongols failed to appear in 1300. The same happened in 1301 and 1302. News circulated in Europe that the Mongols had finally conquered the Holy Land and Jerusalem in 1300, and handed it over to the Christians, but this apparently did not happen.
[5]
In September 1302 the Templars were driven out of Ruad by the attacking Mamluk forces from Egypt, and many were massacred when trapped on the island. The island of Ruad was lost, and when Ghâzân died in 1304 dreams of a rapid reconquest of the Holy Land were destroyed.
In April 1305, the new Mongol ruler
Oljeitu sent letters to Philip,
[6] the Pope, and
Edward I of England. He again offered a military collaboration between the Christian nations of Europe and the Mongols against the Mamluks. European nations accordingly prepared a crusade, but were delayed, and the crusade never took place. In the meantime Oljeitu launched a last campaign against the Mamluks (1312-13), in which he was unsuccessful. A settlement with the Mamluks would only be found when Oljeitu's son signed the
Treaty of Aleppo with the
Mamluks in 1322.
War With the English
The outbreak of hostilities with England in 1294 was the inevitable result of the competitive expansionist monarchies, triggered by a secret Franco-Scottish pact of mutual assistance against
Edward I, who was Philip's brother-in-law, having married Philip's sister
Marguerite; inconclusive campaigns for the control of
Gascony to the southwest of France were fought in 1294–98 and 1300–03. Philippe gained
Guienne but was forced to return it. No major war had been fought in Europe since the 'teens, and in the interim the nature of warfare had changed: it had become more professional, technologically more advanced and much more expensive. The search for income to cover military expenditures set its stamp on Philip's reign and his contemporary reputation. Pursuant to the terms of the
Treaty of Paris (1303), the marriage of Philip's daughter
Isabella to
the Prince of Wales, heir of Philip's enemy, celebrated at
Boulogne, 25 January 1308, was meant to seal a peace; instead it would produce an eventual English claimant to the French throne itself, and the
Hundred Years War.
The drive for income
In the shorter term, Philip arrested
Jews so he could seize their assets to accommodate the inflated costs of modern warfare: he expelled them from his French territories in 1306. His financial victims included
Lombard bankers and rich abbots. He was condemned by his enemies in the
Catholic Church[7] for his spendthrift lifestyle. He debased the coinage. When he also levied taxes on the French
clergy of one half their annual income, he caused an uproar within the
Roman Catholic Church and the papacy, prompting
Pope Boniface VIII to issue the Bull ''
Clericis laicos'', forbidding the transferance of any church property to the French Crown and prompting a drawn-out diplomatic battle with the King. In order to condemn the pope, Philip convoked an assembly of bishops, nobles and grand bourgeois of Paris, a precursor to the
Etats Généraux that appeared for the first time during his reign, a measure of the professionalism and order that his ministers were introducing into government. Philip emerged victorious, after having sent his agent
William Nogaret to
arrest Boniface at Anagni, when the French archbishop Bertrand de Goth was elected pope as
Clement V and the official seat of the papacy moved to
Avignon, an
enclave surrounded by French territories, commencing the captive
Avignon Papacy.
In Flanders
later portrait of Philip the Fair
He suffered a major embarrassment when an army of 2,500 noble men-at-arms (Knights and Squires) and 4,000 infantry he sent to suppress an uprising in
Flanders was defeated in the
Battle of the Golden Spurs near
Kortrijk on
11 July 1302. Philip reacted with energy to the humiliation and personally defeated the Flemings at
Mons-en-Pévèle two years later. Finally, in
1305, Philip forced the Flemish to accept a harsh peace treaty after his success at the
battle of Mons-en-Pévèle; the peace exacted heavy reparations and humiliating penalties, and added the rich cloth cities of
Lille and
Douai, sites of major cloth fairs, to the royal territory.
Béthune, first of the Flemish cities to yield, was granted to Mahaut, Countess of Artois, whose two daughters, to secure her fidelity, were married to Philip's two sons.
Suppression of the Knights Templar
On Friday,
October 13,
1307, hundreds of
Knights Templar in France were simultaneously arrested by agents of Philip the Fair, to be later tortured into admitting heresy in the Order
[8]. (This is one of the reasons why Friday the 13th is seen as unlucky.) The Knights Templar were a 200-year-old
military order, supposedly answerable only to the Pope. But Philip used his influence over Clement V, who was largely his pawn, to disband the order and remove its ecclesiastical status and protection in order to plunder it.
A modern historical view is that Philip seized the considerable Templar treasury and broke up the Templar monastic banking system. In
1314, he had the last Grand Master of the Templars,
Jacques de Molay, burnt at the stake in Paris. According to legend, de Molay cursed both Philip and Clement V from the flames, saying that he would summon them before God's Tribunal within a year; as it turned out, both King and Pope died within the next year.
Philip IV's rule signaled the decline of the papacy's power from its near complete authority. His palace located on the
Île de la Cité is represented today by surviving sections of the
Conciergerie. He died during a hunt when he was mauled by a wild boar and is buried in
Saint Denis Basilica. He was succeeded by his son
Louis X.
Ancestors
Children
Philip the Fair
The children of Philip IV and Jeanne of Navarre were:
# Marguerite (1288–1300)
#
Louis X - (
October 4,
1289–
June 5,
1316)
#
Philip V - (
1291–
January 3,
1322)
#
Isabelle - (c.
1292–
August 23,
1358)
#
Charles IV - (
1294–
February 1,
1328)
# Robert (1297–1308)
All three of his sons reaching adulthood would become kings of France, and his daughter, as consort of
Edward II, was queen of England.
See also
★
Guillaume de Nogaret
★
Enguerrand de Marigny
Notes
1. "''Ce n'est ni un homme ni une bête. C'est une statue.''"
2. Source
3. "Histoires des Croisades III", Rene Grousset, quoting "La Flor des Estoires d'Orient" by Haiton
4. Source
5. "Gesta Dei per Mongolos 1300. The Genesis of a Non-Event" Sylvia Schein,
The English Historical Review, Vol. 94, No. 373 (Oct., 1979), p. 805, Source
6. Mostaert and Cleaves, pp. 56-57, Source
7. Contemporary chroniclers were all monks.
8. Malcolm Barber, The Trial of the Templars. Cambridge University Press, 1978. ISBN 0-521-45727-0.
References
★
Joseph Strayer. ''The reign of Philip the Fair'', 1980. Representing over 30 years of research, considered one of the most comprehensive medieval biographies of any monarch.
★ Favier, Jean ''Philippe le Bel''
★ Goyau, Georges. "Philip IV (the Fair)." ''The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XII''. 1911.
[1]
★ ''
Grandes Chroniques de France''
★
A.H. Newman, in Philip Schaff, ''The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge''
★ Knights Templar History and Mythology
[2]
External links
★
Philip IV (The Fair) - Catholic Encyclopedia
★
Philip IV - 1268 - 1314 - templarhistory.com
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