(1081–1137). Son of Philip I and Bertha of Holland and king of France from 1108 to 1137, Louis seems known as much for his corpulence as for his limited, though successful, gain of control over his patrimony, the Île-de-France. Inheriting chaotic political and feudal challenges to royal power, Louis overcame the robber barons and the feudatories’ conservative defiance of his nascent challenge to their localized authority. After the death of his first wife, Lucienne de Rochefort, Louis wed Adelaide of Savoy in 1115, who bore him his heir, Louis VII, in 1120.
Louis realized the need to establish his own position in the Île before he could extend royal claims beyond what is traditionally, if erroneously, known as the French royal domain. Toward the close of his reign, he intervened with unprecedented success in the south of France. The marriage of his son and heir, the future Louis VII, to Eleanor, daughter of the duke of Aquitaine, was a sign less of the duke’s status than of the rising position of the king. Louis’s interference in Flanders and Normandy was less blessed.
If Louis’s success in extending his power outside the Île-de-France was ambiguous, his reform of the royal administration was not. The struggle to remove major administrative offices from the hands of their hereditary holders was difficult but eventually triumphant. Louis replaced the old administrative hierarchy with new men drawn from the lower nobility and clergy from the domain. Notable among these new administrators was Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis (1081–1151), the first in a line of great statesmen and royal advisers drawn from the ranks of the clergy, a line that ended with Richelieu, Mazarin, and Fleury. Louis was also the first great royal patron of communes, most of them in and surrounding the royal patrimony.
Louis VI, then, consolidated his power within his ancestral homeland and made its administration more amenable to the royal will, thus laying the foundation upon which his successors would build the French monarchy as a dominant power in western European medieval history.
