Seven Ages of Paris (5 page)

Through Abélard, in pedagogical terms the twelfth century became the age of dialectics; and, through the focal point his teaching provided, inevitably Paris’s first university grew around it. Though modelling itself on northern Italy’s Bologna, Europe’s oldest university, this forerunner of the Sorbonne started off life as a guild—or, in effect, and which was to be of considerable consequence in the later, stormy eras of the Sorbonne, not least in 1968, a trades union.

LOUIS VII INHERITS SUGER

Under the administrative genius of Suger the city’s first centralized administration was set up; so too were its professional guilds, the earliest being the ancient company of water merchants—appropriately enough given the transcending importance of the Seine. They were followed by the mercers and the butchers. Yet in many aspects Paris remained a collection of villages, with pigs roaming muddy streets. One such “diabolic” boar caused the death of Louis VI’s firstborn heir, Prince Philippe, when his horse shied and threw him near Saint-Gervais. There followed the great political coup of the fat King: the marriage of his new heir, Prince Louis, to Eleanor of Aquitaine. But on his return from the wedding in Bordeaux, Louis VI was stricken with dysentery, dying in 1137 in his Palais de la Cité—on a carpet over which he supposedly had had ashes laid in the form of a cross. He was only fifty-six, but his final achievement profoundly affected the destiny of France.

Just as the English Plantagenets, by way of wreaking England’s revenge on the mainland of France, were establishing a firm foothold in Normandy, Louis VII inherited from his father a united kingdom, at peace with itself and abroad, sound finances and, above all, Abbé Suger. But, unfortunately for France, he inherited little of his father’s strength of character. Jealously in love, he immediately fell under the spell of his bride, Eleanor, a formidable woman, intelligent and well read, coquettish and highly sexed, perhaps the outstanding personality of her age. Louis’s religious policy seems to have been dictated by Eleanor, which led to a falling out with the Pope and excommunication. To gain reconciliation with Rome, he ill-advisedly set forth on a crusade—the conventional wisdom of those days. Afraid (because of her amorous propensities) to leave her alone in Paris, he took Eleanor with him. It proved a huge mistake. By the end of a journey plagued by heat and hunger, as well as by danger at the hands of the enemy, Eleanor had come to detest her weak husband. In Syria she fell into the arms of a youthful uncle, Raymond of Aquitaine, Prince of Antioch. When Louis pressed on to besiege Jerusalem, Eleanor was also rumoured to have bestowed her favours there on a virile Moorish slave. Meanwhile Louis suffered a serious military defeat.

At home Suger, appointed regent, administered the kingdom with remarkable skill, but, to maintain the roofs of Paris in good repair, he was forced to dip into his own considerable wealth, as well as ransacking the coffers of Saint-Denis. There was a threat of revolt by the King’s younger brother, the Comte de Dreux, which Suger managed to stifle; but, now a frail old man, he wrote urging Louis to return post-haste. The King returned, together with Eleanor, pregnant with a child that was not his. Suger reported that “we have seen to it that your houses and palaces are in good order.” Two years later he died—having given Louis one last piece of advice: don’t divorce Eleanor, but put the interests of the kingdom above your own marital grievances. Shortly after Suger’s death, however, in 1152 Louis obtained an annulment from the Pope on the ground that he and Eleanor were too closely related. Two years later, a free Eleanor married Henry Plantagenet, the future Henry II of England, a potent and ruthless warlord many years younger than herself. She was to live to be eighty-two, and to give Henry not only a number of illustrious sons but, more important, Aquitaine, or suzerainty over half of the territory that Louis le Gros had bequeathed France. With it came a casus belli for what French historians call the “first” Hundred Years War.

Hardly was Suger cold in the grave than all the political achievements of Louis le Gros began to fall apart. Within ten years of Suger’s death, Louis VII had been defeated in battle by his rival for Eleanor, and had lost Brittany and Toulouse as well. By the end of his forty-three-year reign he had managed to reduce France geographically to what she had been in the time of the first Capetians, throwing to the winds—or, rather, to his rival in love—his father’s legacy of rich Aquitaine.

Louis had two daughters, supposedly, by Eleanor—but no heir. He remarried, but his second wife died childless. His third wife, Alix of Champagne, in 1165 finally produced a son who—fifteen years later—was to become Philippe II. Consciously mirroring the Roman emperor who gave his name to the month, he was named Auguste because he had been born in August. As well as the crown of France, to young Philippe Auguste was also bequeathed as a legacy the priceless foundation work of Suger, of the twelfth-century Renaissance, which would come to be seen as a true golden age for France, and for Paris.

Age One

1180–1314

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PHILIPPE AUGUSTE

Lutetia, under the Romans (© Gianni Dagli Orti/Corbis)

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ONE

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Sunday at Bouvines

I only wish this pile of stones could be silver, gold or diamonds … the more precious the materials of this castle, the greater pleasure I will have in possessing it when it falls into my hands.

PRINCE PHILIPPE (LATER KING PHILIPPE AUGUSTE), AGED NINE, IN 1174

THE BUILD-UP

Some important battles in history have a surreptitious way of crystallizing what has gone before, as well as putting down a kind of marker for what is about to occur. They can also affect the pattern of events far beyond the battlefield itself. It is perhaps what makes historians call them “decisive.” Bouvines, fought on 27 July 1214, was one of those. It was won by France against a powerful coalition of foes headed by King John of England, on a Sunday. This in itself was unusual, for in those days of religious correctness knights and kings on the whole observed the sabbath as far as battle was concerned. Bouvines was, moreover, to set the future shape not only of France but of Britain, too—and it would be fundamental to the development of the capital city Paris was to become. Some fifteen kilometres equidistant from the present-day cities of Tournai (in Belgium) and France’s Lille, Bouvines lies in soggy Flanders, site of the terrible battlefields where the destiny of France was to be played out exactly seven centuries later, 200 kilometres north-east of Paris.

When France’s King Philippe Auguste arrived on the throne in 1180,* aged fifteen, he inherited a tiny state, a fraction the size of Plantagenet England and its European dependencies, land-locked and surrounded by powerful rivals. How then did he come to find himself fighting—and winning—such a key battle in so unpromising a corner of Europe?

The then King of England, Henry II, was an imposing, authoritarian ruler who, at least in the early stages of his reign, seemed to have everything going for him. His French father, the Plantagenet Duc d’Anjou, brought him the rich territories of Anjou and Normandy; and he acquired England through his marriage to the unhappy Matilda, heiress to William the Conqueror’s son Henry I. Between Matilda and her cousin King Stephen, England had been reduced to anarchy and, by the time Henry Plantagenet came to the throne in 1154 at the age of twenty-one, was only too ready for the smack of strong rule. In short order, Henry found himself reigning unchallenged from the Cheviots to the Pyrenees, his short-lived Angevin Empire looming over the diminutive plot that was Louis VII’s France. With conspicuous cunning, Henry set about the encirclement of that plot by a network of alliances, and at times during his reign it looked as if the best the Capetians could expect would be to become vassals of the Angevin Empire controlled from Westminster and Rouen. Yet the murder in 1170 of Archbishop Thomas à Becket—apparently invoked if not actually ordered by the King—turned things upside down. The “turbulent priest” became an instant international martyr, and a saint. Henry could wear a horsehair shirt and have himself flogged in Avranches Cathedral by way of atonement, yet his image, and his power, would never quite recover from this particular bloodstain. Louis, France and Paris were saved.

Storing up trouble for himself and the Angevin Empire, the increasingly unpopular Henry now carried out a Lear-like break-up of his territories among his sons, Henry the Young (aged fifteen in 1170), Richard (the future Coeur de Lion, aged twelve) and Geoffrey (eleven). John, born only in 1167, was left out of the carve-up—thus to be known henceforth in France as “Jean-Sans-Terre.” As Lear discovered, this was to prove folly in the extreme. Prince Henry, though already crowned in anticipation in 1170 and strategically married to the daughter of Louis VII, was treated by his father-in-law as if he were already king, but in fact was never to succeed—dying in 1183. In 1173, a general insurrection, the product of widespread popular discontent, broke out against Henry. With his customary vigour, however, over a period of two years he crushed one by one all the coalitions mounted against him.

Meanwhile in 1176 the worst flood of the Seine in memory swept away both bridges, carried off mills, houses and livestock on the crumbling banks, and came close to engulfing the whole city. Attempting a form of flood control untried in modern times, Louis and his entire court and every undrowned monk and priest, headed by the Bishop of Paris, went in procession to the edge of the swirling waters. Holding aloft a nail from the True Cross, the Bishop prayed: “In this song of the Holy Passion, may the waters return to their bed and this miserable people be protected!” The rain stopped, and the waters ebbed just in time.

The uprising of 1173 had demonstrated the fundamental Achilles’ heel of Henry’s empire—the divisiveness of his quarrelsome sons, greedy for territory and glory. Their future adversary Philippe, heir to the ageing Louis, saw it. Aged only nine, standing before Henry’s seemingly unassailable fortress at Gisors, and showing his future mettle, he is said to have remarked to his entourage, “I only wish this pile of stones could be silver, gold or diamonds … the more precious the materials of this castle, the greater pleasure I will have in possessing it when it falls into my hands.” He would have to wait the best part of a generation.

In 1180 Louis VII died, and Philippe Auguste succeeded him, aged only fifteen. As he grew into the job, Philippe earned a reputation for being rusé comme un renard (cunning as a fox). The only existing contemporary pen-portrait of him describes him as:

a handsome, strapping fellow, bald but with a cheerful face of ruddy complexion, and a temperament much inclined towards good-living, wine and women. He was generous to his friends, stingy towards those who displeased him, well versed in the art of stratagem, orthodox in belief, prudent and stubborn in his resolves. He made judgements with great speed and exactitude.

He was keen to seek the counsel of intelligent men of humble birth, notably Brother Guérin, Bishop of Senlis, and Barthélemy de Roye, and he restricted his advisers at court to a very small circle. He was to give the French monarchy (in the words of the historian André Maurois) “the three instruments of rule which it lacked: tractable officials, money and soldiers.” He was also to be one of the first true lovers of the city of Paris.

France was soon at war again. By the facts of life of the twelfth century, this signified skirmishes interrupted by frequent truces, but without any grand battle—until Bouvines in 1214. By the fifth year of his reign, through a combination of skilful campaigning in Picardy and the dowry of his first queen, Isabelle of Hainault, the young Philippe had managed to expand his kingdom substantially northwards and southwards, including the key city of Amiens. Almost immediately, he found himself at war with the mighty Henry. It seemed like David taking on Goliath, but Philippe was cunning in his strategy of isolating the old King by forming alliances with his sons, first Geoffrey, then Richard (Prince Henry having died barely three years after his father-in-law, Louis)—and also with Barbarossa, the German Emperor.

Henry, stricken by rheumatism and a painful fistula, was already old beyond his years. At the beginning of 1188, Philippe, having split the Angevin Empire and doubled his forces through his alliance with Richard, was poised to move into Henry’s Normandy. Then suddenly news came from the Middle East that the Saracen, Saladin, had taken Jerusalem and was threatening Antioch. The Pope, Clement III, commanded the Christian kings to cease fighting each other and embark on a fresh crusade (the Third). But before they could set out, Henry had died, on 7 July 1189, in the chapel of his French château of Chinon, to be buried in his Abbey of Fontevrault. On the 20th, Richard was crowned duke of Normandy in Rouen, and king of England in London on 3 September. He and Philippe Auguste then departed, as allies and close friends, for the Holy Land.

Despite the romanticized portrait of him given in British Victorian history books, Richard Coeur de Lion was something of a brute. He was arrogant and quarrelsome, with a habit of sowing hatred and rancour around him. At home (which he rashly left in the treacherous and incompetent hands of his brother, Jean-Sans-Terre) he was accepted as a neglectful, popular absentee ruler, as befitting the repute of a knight errant. In contrast, Philippe left his kingdom well organized and in good hands, as set down in a famous document, the Testament of 1190. Among other things, this provided for the construction of a continuous fortified wall or enceinte girdling Paris, making her impregnable to any enemy assailant for the first time in her history. It was just as well, because he and his friend Richard (their intimacy had evidently extended, in the innocent way of the Middle Ages, to sharing a bed in Paris) were soon to become the most bitter enemies. Reaching Genoa together, the two leaders first fell out over the number of ships each was to provide for crossing the Mediterranean. In Sicily there were English charges of bad faith against Philippe, accused of conniving in the destruction of Richard’s army. Finally arriving in the Holy Land, the two kings managed to tip the balance in the terrible Siege of Acre, already under attack for two years. But by the time of its capitulation in July 1191, intrigues plus the stresses of a grim campaign had seriously undermined the Anglo-French entente. To the enduring fury of Richard, Philippe now decided to break off from the Third Crusade and head for home. The Count of Flanders had died during the Siege, and Philippe had his eyes on the Count’s possessions in Artois and Vermandois.