(1220–1271). Count of Toulouse. Alphonse was the brother of Louis IX (St. Louis) and was himself one of the great territorial princes of the 13th century. When they came of age, the younger sons of Louis VIII were provided for by means of apanages, territorial holdings of considerable extent. Alphonse, who was invested with the apanage of Poitou in 1241, immediately ran up against serious problems. Poitou and its southern marches constituted a region that had seen an English army of invasion a generation before. Nobles in the region were fiercely independent, and many had rallied to the English king, their former overlord, in 1214. They had been defeated, but the region remained discontented. So long as their new lord was the French king, a remote figure, discontent did not become open rebellion; but in 1241, when authority was given over to the cadet prince Alphonse at a great festival in Saumur in the heartland of Poitou, the occasion was interpreted as a direct challenge to the independence and authority of the native nobility. Alphonse’s first years as count of Poitou were thus checkered by the necessity of putting down a rebellion in which the rebels received both the support of the English and the encouragement of the count of Toulouse. The rebellion failed, but it pointed up the precariousness of Capetian rule in the southwest.
Alphonse’s holdings were vastly increased in the south in 1249 on the death of his father-in-law, the erstwhile rebel Count Raymond VII of Toulouse. Raymond’s heir, as provided by the Treaty of Meaux-Paris (1229) that ended the Albigensian Crusade, was his daughter Jeanne, Alphonse’s wife. Although he was with his brother on crusade at the time of Raymond’s death, Alphonse’s interests were protected by the decisive action of his mother, the regent Blanche of Castile. Reacting swiftly to information that some southerners were refusing to adhere to the transfer of the deceased count’s lands to Alphonse, she made a show of force and quickly won their capitulation.
The biography of Alphonse, therefore, is largely the history of his attempts to govern his apanage and the diverse lands that fell to his administration from the holdings of the count of Toulouse. Back from crusade in 1250, he set about ruling these vast territories, which included, besides Poitou and Toulouse, Saintonge, Auvergne, and part of the Rhône Valley. In addition to resident administrators (sénéchaux, viguiers, and bayles), he employed enquêteurs, investigators modeled on his brother’s enquêteurs, whose duty it was to investigate periodically complaints against his government. He had commissioned a handful of these agents in 1249 at the time of his departure on crusade. He extended the commissions in 1251 to all the lands inherited from the count of Toulouse; and he used the enquêteurs regularly thereafter. Their work went a long way toward assuaging the discontent in his territories.
Though governing from Paris, Alphonse took an active, almost obsessive interest in the details of administration, as his surviving administrative correspondence and his excellent accounts demonstrate. He monitored closely the activities of his provincial officials and took a judicious interest in the workings of the high court or parlement of Toulouse.
It is difficult to get a nuanced sense of Alphonse as a man. Although briefly a crusader, he seems on the whole to have been conventionally pious. He detested Judaism and vigorously exploited the wealth of the Jews in his domains; but he did not disdain to use a Jewish physician when he had some painful eye trouble. There is an element of closefistedness in his character, although it would be wrong to call him a miser. He seems to have enjoyed a happy married life. Despite the fact that she bore him no children, Alphonse never deserted Jeanne, and both went on St. Louis’s last crusade (1270). Both died on the trip homeward (1271) within a few days of each other. Their holdings escheated to the crown.
William Chester Jordan
Boutaric, Edgard. Saint Louis et Alfonse de Poitiers. Paris: Plon, 1870.
DeVic, Claude, and Jean Vaissète. Histoire générale du Languedoc, ed. Ernest Molinier. New edition. Toulouse: Privat, 1879, Vol. 7.
Fournier, Pierre-François, and Pascal Guébin, eds. Enquêtes administratives d’Alfonse de Poitiers. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1959.
This is the complete article, containing 705 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
