God's War: A New History of the Crusades

In many ways the rise of the Hautevilles constituted an experience typical of eleventh-century France. The disintegration of the Carolingian empire in the late ninth century not only permanently divided the constituent political entities into East Francia (essentially Germany from Lorraine to the Elbe), Italy and West Francia (between the Rhine and the southern Pyrenean marches). The chaos of civil war and invasions by Vikings from the north and Arab pirates in the south also caused effective civil power within West Francia to become devolved on to the local royal agents, the counts, who wielded vice-regal military, fiscal and judicial authority. By the end of the tenth century the kingdom of France remained a legal and ideological construct, but its kings exerted little genuine power outside their own family lands. The main political foci were the great counties ruled as autonomous principalities by comital families who rapidly acquired their own grand, if often fictional, pedigrees to match their practical status. The most important counties, some later elevating themselves into duchies, were Flanders, Champagne, Normandy, Brittany, Burgundy, Blois-Chartres, Anjou, Paris (i.e. the Ile de France), Poitou-Aquitaine, which acquired the duchy of Gascony, Toulouse and Barcelona, which was to be attracted away from the French orbit by the opportunities and successes of its Iberian neighbours. Beside these, numerous lesser counties sprang up, some owing allegiance to the greater lords, some autonomous.

To this political patchwork were added wide geographic, economic, linguistic and ethnic contrasts. Brittany was still a Celtic region; the Basques had given their name to Gascony. Elsewhere the chief linguistic divide was between those in the north who spoke langue d’oil (so described after the word used for ‘yes’, oil) and the speakers of langue d’oc in the south, the dividing line running east–west well to the north of the modern Midi. These linguistic contrasts mirrored different histories, customs and laws. The far south retained a tradition of written law and limited urbanization to match its Mediterranean climate. Elsewhere, there was no uniformity of rules of landholding, judicial systems, weights, measures or currency. A kingdom often in name alone, nonetheless in 987 the great magnates of northern France, perhaps on the promptings of pro-German interests, decided to change the royal dynasty from the remnants of the attenuated Carolingians to the family of the counts of Paris, in the figure of Hugh Capet (987–96), his descendants being known as the Capetians. The exclusion of the Carolingian claimant suited the Germans, whose kings now came from a non-Carolingian, relatively parvenu dynasty from Saxony. Once installed, the Capetians set about securing their hold on the monarchy by reducing the elective element in French kingship not least by consistent, determined and remarkably successful efforts to ensure that each Capetian king left a son to succeed him. (Louis VII had to wait until his third wife and his mid-forties before he had a son.) The unique Capetian genetic triumph, which saw son succeed father in an unbroken line from 987 to 1316, transformed the nature of the French monarchy, but only over time.

The Capetians were aided in their ambitions by three factors. Their family lands, centred on the Ile de France, were among the richest in western Europe and straddled the main trade routes: the Seine, Marne, Loire river systems, which linked eastwards to the Rhine, Meuse and Low Countries, west to the Atlantic, north to the English Channel and south to the Saône-Rhône corridor and the Mediterranean. The church lent the Capetians ideological support and material assistance. The king was patron to wealthy monasteries and controlled appointments to important bishoprics and archbishoprics outside his own lands. The final advantage possessed by the Capetians lay in the role of kingship itself. Although few of the great princes in France bothered to pay the king homage and fealty (some counts of Anjou were happy to), the office of king legitimized those of the counts. A king, however feeble, was needed, as the events of 987 recognized. When, as rarely occurred, a foreign invasion was threatened, as in 1124, the counts rallied round. The potential for the king, as legal overlord, to interfere in the affairs of any county in the realm was undeniable but only enforceable in political circumstances that did not regularly occur until the late twelfth century.