(1165–1223). King of France, 1180–1223. Philip II was the first great architect of the medieval French monarchy. Building upon the accomplishments of Louis VI and Louis VII, he began the process of converting feudal into national monarchy, expanding the crown’s political and geographical influence, by his death in 1223, far beyond what they had been at his accession in 1180.
As was common in the case of kings ascending as children to the throne, Philip was initially dominated by powerful relatives, in his case the influential and wealthy ruling family of Champagne. His early struggle to assert royal influence was supported by his father’s rival, Henry II of England, who denied himself the pleasure of taking advantage of the fifteen-year-old king’s apparent weakness. A few years later, Henry probably wished that he had not been so honorable, since Philip utilized the traditional patricidal conflict traditional in the Angevin family against his former protector. This policy saw the French king triumphant over his father’s ancient adversary and his sons by 1204, when the luckless King John saw the Angevin territories in France dissolve. By the end of his reign, Philip II had increased his territory nearly fourfold. The English loss of territory north of the Loire augmented the French ruler’s lands, but he also added to his acquisitions by the forfeitures of contumacious vassals, by political duplicity, by cleverly arranged marriages, and by manipulation of the confusion over land possession arising from the Albigensian Crusade. Philip Augustus was not a great military leader; he was an astute politician.
Philip was the founder of the centralized bureaucratic state. He chose bourgeois administrators, as well as men from the lower nobility, to run his kingdom, men whose primary loyalty was to their king rather than to their class or to their families. Their offices were remunerated by salary rather than farmed. Philip used feudal rights to enhance his royal position; in his reign, the authority of the king began shifting slowly from his rights exercised as feudal suzerain to his rights exercised as sovereign; he was becoming less a private, feudal lord than a public figure of authority. This obviously contributed to a decline in the functional importance of the feudal structure (it was never a feudal system), as did the growing commutation of lordvassal relationships from mutually exchanged personal obligations into money payments. The administrators of Philip’s domains, baillis and prévôts, were essentially estate managers, men with wide-ranging fiscal, judicial, military, and other responsibilities. Philip’s financial administration improved greatly, his policies based upon the model of his newly conquered province, Normandy. He also made Paris what we moderns would call the capital of France.
Philip Augustus was, then, the monarch under whom French monarchy became more a practical than a theoretical concept. His domain, larger than the fief of any vassal, was to remain the dominant power base in France in succeeding generations. As Luchaire wrote, at Philip’s death “the [Capetian] dynasty was solidly established, and France founded.”
