The Reign of Philip the Fair

by Joseph R. Strayer

The book description for the previously published "The Reign of Philip the Fair" is not yet available.

Genres: History, Biography, Medieval History, France

470 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Joseph Reese Strayer taught at Princeton University for many decades, starting in the 1930s. He was chair of the history department (1941–1961) and president of the American Historical Association in 1971. Strayer has been credited with training a large percentage of the American medievalists profession; many of his students are still teaching and active. Notable students include Teofilo Ruiz, William Chester Jordan, and Richard W. Kaeuper. Norman F. Cantor often highlighted his status as a student of Strayer's, but several of Strayer's other pupils - who wish to remain anonymous for personal and professional reasons - have expressed their doubt that Strayer ever acknowledged Cantor as his student or that Cantor had any formal affiliation with him at all.

When not teaching medieval history at Princeton, Strayer was involved with the CIA, as a member of the CIA's Office of National Estimates. The extent of his involvement, at a time when the C.I.A was running covert operations to destabilize governments around the world (Iran, Brazil, Congo, Dominican Republic, Guyana and Chile), has never been fully assessed or verified.

Norman Cantor recognized three books as most important to Strayer's legacy: Feudalism (1965), which summarized three decades of his research and thinking on the topic; On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (1970), in which he shows the relevance of medieval historical institutions to modern governmental institutions; and The Reign of Philip the Fair (1980), representing over 30 years of archival research and the most comprehensive work on the topic in any language - other than Jean Favier's Philippe le Bel (1978). Strayer was editor of the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, the largest and most comprehensive encyclopedia of the Middle Ages in the English language.

Reviews

[Andrew Dockrill · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most mysterious yet integral monarchs to have ruled France in the medieval ages and who has escaped the grasp of most historians for hundreds of years. Philip has often been known by many epitaphs such as "the iron king", the "marble king". On the other hand, Bernard Saisset, a bishop who stood trial for his blasphemous oratory on the pulpit, compared Philip to an owl "the handsomest of birds which is worth absolutely nothing... such is our king of France, who is the handsomest man in the world and who can do nothing except stare at men."

This book is arguably the only historical work on the reign of Philip the Fair to be done in English and takes the approach to his reign in categorical research essays which his grad students helped him to write. Most of the book deals with key figures in his administration such as Guillaume de Nogaret and Engurrand de Marigny - the two most notable in his reign, while Philip largely remains in the shadows, so if someone is looking to get to know the man, which is extremely difficult, you might as well look elsewhere. Strayer looks to explore some of the many questions of promotions and pay scales and how people typically rose in Philips administration while also examining the company the king himself kept. His wife Jean and his sons get little to no mention, which is a shame but Jean is often forgotten in the chronicles of his reign. Strayer also writes for an extremely academic audience as his voice is very formal and analytical while also assuming that the reader is well versed on Philips reign, so if you do not already possess a rough memory of the events of his reign you will be lost. Having already read George Minois book on Philip I managed quite well and the read was very enjoyable, but it is should not be mistaken for a chronological biography. Strayers approach to Philips reign in a sense tries to tread new ground in the sense that no one has yet to write explicitly on Philips bureaucracy but firmly sticks to the popular historical opinions held by Minois and partially agrees with Jean Favier, while disagreeing on some aspects of his reign such as Philips decision making.

I would only recommend this book for those who have a serious interest in the administration of Philips reign from head to toe, and who want theoretical explanations for some of Philips decisions, such as the persecution of the Templars and why Phillip chose to make war against Edward in the duchy of Aquitaine and against Flanders and while abstaining from getting too involved in external european affairs.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 4 out of 5]

His best books I've noted below

Administration of Normandy Under Saint Louis (1932)
+The Middle Ages, 395–1500 (1942) (4ed 1959)
+Western Europe in the Middle Ages: a Short History (1955)
[a 200 page version of his 1942 book which is 70% shorter)
The Interpretation of History (1950)
The Course of Civilization (1961)
Feudalism (1965)
On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (1970)
Medieval statecraft and the perspectives of history (1971)
The Albigensian Crusade (1972)
The Royal Domain in the Bailliage of Rouen (1976)
+The Reign of Philip the Fair (1980)
Dictionary of the Middle Ages, editor (1982 to 1989)

[AskHistorians]

One of the few biographies of a medieval individual, examining the man who wielded together the French state and humbled the papacy in the process.

[Truls Ljungström · Rating 2 out of 5]

Faktarik, men urbota tråkig.

[Andrew Reece · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joseph R. Strayer Studies The Life & Reign Of France's Eleventh Capetian Monarch, King Philip IV The Fair.

Known as The Iron King for his austere demeanor and inflexible ruling style, Philip IV Capet was born in 1268 at the Palace of Fontainebleau southeast of Paris. He has become famous for his role in the dissolution of the Templar Order which began on Friday, 13 October 1307 with the apprehension of hundreds of Templars on false heresy charges, and throughout his 29-year reign he remained aloof from his subjects, preferring to conduct his policies through high-placed ministers such as Guillaume de Nogaret and Enguerrand de Marigny. Joseph R. Strayer's study explores Philip's regnal term with a comprehensive, scholarly approach that focuses on a variety of relevant subjects, including the king's early life and family affiliations, the men whom comprised his administration, his relationship with the Catholic Church, and his wars in Aquitaine and Flanders.

This 2019 reprinting of Joseph R. Strayer's 1980 The Reign of Philip the Fair is published by Princeton University Press as part of the Princeton Legacy Library, and its 423-page main text is divided into six chapters with a fourteen-page bibliography of English and French sources and an index at the end of the volume. Chapters one, four, and five are narrative-driven and tell the story of Philip's life and reign, while chapters two and three are devoted to biographies of the careers of Philip's key councilors and advisers (chapter two), and to the bureaucratic divisions of his government (chapter three). Chapter six summarizes Philip's domestic policies, branching into royal propaganda, socioeconomic effects of his taxation and currency manipulation, and his use of assemblies to explain his policies, among other topics.

In Chapter 1, The King and His Family, Strayer narrates Philip's early life and reign, stressing the crucial role that events outside his control played in influencing the king's character and personality. "Philip the Fair is a hard man to get to know. His contemporaries were puzzled by him, and later historians have found him no easier to understand. Very formal, very conscious of his royal dignity, he seems always screened off from the world by his chief ministers & his bureaucrats. There are almost no anecdotes about him: the Vicar of God, the high priest of the religion of monarchy seldom revealed his human side. Yet there was a human side. He was capable of deep affection and sudden flashes of anger; he was loyal to his friends; he showed stubborn courage in times of adversity; and he had strong, if peculiar, convictions about morality and religion." Later in the chapter, he continues: "It is well to remember that Philip was in many ways "a baron of the times." He had a proper respect for the role of the great lords of the realm and for the dignity and rights of noble birth. This respect explains some of the curious contradictions in his policy. He would take extreme measures to secure acknowledgement of his rights as suzerain, but once he had obtained that recognition he would return almost everything that he had seized to the once rebellious but now repentant vassal." Philip's mother Isabella of Aragon died when he was very young, and his father Philip III remarried, to Marie de Brabant, whom was more concerned with advancing the interests of her own offspring than with devoting time to the child of her husband's previous marriage.

In Chapter 2, The King and His Officers, Professor Strayer divides Philip's bureaucratic personnel into four categories, providing an overview of each - the high officials based in Paris, the supporting staff in Paris, the high-ranking provincial officials, and the lower-ranking local officials. While his predecessors' officers had been appointed from regions that had long been under crown authority, eschewing recently acquired territories such as Normandy and Languedoc, Philip represented a shift from this trend. His trust in the "old guard" was selective at best, and he preferred to add "new men" to his administration whose allegiances were bound to him. "The new men were much more dependent on the king's favor, much less bound by old traditions, much more willing to accept innovations in policy. Socially, Philip preferred the company of the old nobility that had served his ancestors; politically, he wanted the assistance of able men, regardless of rank or place of origin." These new men were driven by the acquisition of wealth, a sense of obligation to the monarchy, regnal affiliation, and the pursuit of power - "This is a strong force; men have always been willing to sacrifice ease, comfort, and even wealth in order to achieve power. Philip's agents had the authority of the king behind them. They could give orders to counts and bishops; they could collect vast sums of money from all classes of society; they could investigate the activities and determine the rights of nobles, clergy and communes. Their acts could be reversed only by higher officials or by the king himself." Strayer focuses on notable members in Philip's administration, including Guillaume de Nogaret, Enguerrand de Marigny, and Pierre Flot, covering their backgrounds, motivations, and salaries.

Chapter 3, The King and the Administration of the Realm examines the myriad aspects of Philip's administration, from France's division into districts to the varied personnel whom administered them. During this period France was organized into an assortment of regions, territories, and jurisdictions for which the titles were not always uniform throughout the country. The "old royal domain" in the north part of France was split into administrative areas called bailiages, each under the supervision of a bailii, and each bailiage was further split into prévôtés, which were overseen by a prévôt. Southern France was divided into sénéchaussées that were supervised by another official called a seneschal, and were subdivided into three kinds of districts whose names varied by locations, the baylies, viguieries, and jugeries.

In the chapter's financial section Strayer discusses a partial expense analysis from the year 1296 with the amount in the treasury (200,000 livres of Tours) weighed against projected income from sources such as loans from Italian bankers, rich burghers, prelates, and royal officials (totaling 890,000 livres of Tours in this particular instance), among many others. Philip's extraordinary revenue-generation methods such as currency dilution and his clerical tax of one tenth at the end of the thirteenth century are also examined. "The tenths were a very welcome addition to the king's ordinary income; they could amount to a quarter of the receipts of one term, but they were not large enough to cover any extraordinary expense." This chapter alone constitutes 142 pages of the study - the author covers everything from the two treasury departments, the Treasury of the Temple and the Treasury of the Louvre, to the amount of Templar property actually gained by Philip's suppression of the order in 1307, (260,000 livres of Tours), as well as biographical sketches of the intelligent, capable men whom administered Philip's finances. The reviewer would have greatly benefited from reading a general biography on Philip prior to tackling this erudite study, but unfortunately none are available in English - hopefully at some point one of the marvelous French biographies of Philip will be translated for English-speaking audiences to enjoy learning about this inscrutable French monarch.

Discussed in Chapter 4, The King and the Church, the conflict between Philip the Fair and Pope Boniface VIII began over the Languedoc province, an area of tenuous temporal and spiritual authority which had borne its fair share of political unrest in the past 100 years, between the Albigensian Crusade occurring in the early thirteenth century and the ongoing struggle between the Spiritual Franciscans and the Inquisition. The Roman Colonna clan, whom were Boniface's enemies, had married into the Languedoc nobility and settled there, compounding the pope's difficulties while also adding to Philip's problems as the territory was frequently in danger of rebellion during his 29-year rule. According to Strayer, both sides were searching for a reason to begin hostilities, and in the case of Bernard Saisset, the bishop of Pamiers, the king finally found his excuse. Saisset was accused of making a series of disrespectful remarks about the French monarchy in general and about the king personally, who was sufficiently annoyed to detain and question Saisset's staff and associates. While the bishop was eventually released, he had become a tangible manifestation of the fundamental disagreement between the king and pope, and relations worsened, causing Pope Boniface to issue a series of controversial papal bulls which asserted the Catholic Church's temporal and spiritual sovereignty over the French monarchy, and ultimately the entire country. One of these edicts was entitled Ausculta Fili, and Strayer summarizes its basic concepts and accompanies it with his own interpretations, while for another, Unam sanctam, he provides a quotation speaking to its imperious purpose which essentially mandated that all of humanity was subject to the Roman Pontiff in order to receive its salvation. Another equally unpopular bull was Clericos laicos, outlawing all clerical contributions to any lay government.

Philip's famous clash with the Templar Order occurred from 1307-12, resulting in the unprecedented suppression and eventual dissolution of a holy order of knights, and Strayer's hypotheses regarding why exactly this happened revolve around three basic theories - one, Philip needed revenue, as his scheme of diluting the French currency had run full circle and he was searching for the necessary capital to produce new coinage to replace the debased specie he had introduced into the French economy during the 1290s; two, Philip genuinely believed the Templar Order was practicing heretical beliefs, and he managed to convince Pope Boniface VIII's one-removed successor Clement V that this was so; three, Philip was looking for ways to uncover heretical practices and elevate his status as a pious monarch. "Finally, some benefit was gained by portraying the king as a champion of orthodoxy, quicker than the pope to detect the heresy and far more zealous in suppressing it." There is the strange case of Bishop Guichard of Troyes, a prelate who was superstitiously accused of a number of occurrences in which he had no part whatsoever. Strayer provides the bishop's background history and a chronicle of what exactly transpired during the proceedings as the chapter concludes. Chapter 5, The King & His Neighbors discusses Philip's relationship with the Holy Roman Empire and his military campaigns in the Aquitaine and Flanders regions, also featuring a short section on the French Armies which highlights Philip's military chain of command and briefly discusses the careers of several prominent soldier captains whom served in Aquitaine and Flanders, as well as some estimates on the size of the forces Philip was able to put on the field at any given time.

Chapter 6, The King and His People discusses various socioeconomic topics relating to the way Philip and his administration interacted with and were perceived by the people over whom they governed, among them the concept of the king's attachment to the Francie Regnum, or French Kingdom, and the methods by which the king was able to justify his heavy taxation and other extraordinary measures to collect revenue. Philip's costly wars and economic manipulation placed a serious effect on national morale, but his people still held him in high regard despite his shortcomings. "The fact that Philip could press so hard in such dangerous circumstances proves that the royal religion was more than a court cult. The people did revere their king, even when he was following policies that they disliked. Philip's success also demonstrates the flexibility and political skill of the government. Careful negotiation and timely compromise calmed most of the people who were offended by the king's demands." Despite his subjects' tolerance of his unpleasant political and economic tactics, Philip the Fair was never a well-liked ruler. He made use of popular assemblies in a variety of different venues to gauge public reaction for whatever he was planning at the time, to present an image of himself to the public, and to provide reasoning for his controversial acts such as his arrest of the Pope and his suppression of the Templar Order. He did however leave France in a viable economic position by the end of his reign. "No one ever spoke of the good times of Philip the Fair as they did of the good times of St. Louis, but people who lived through the crises of the Hundred Years' War might well have done so. There were no civil wars in Philip's reign, no notable acts of treason, no executions of famous men, no plundering of towns and villages. Philip drew heavily on the political capital accumulated by his ancestors, but he also replenished it. He was king of all France in a way that none of his predecessors had been."

Overall, Joseph R. Strayer's The Reign of Philip the Fair is an exceptional scholarly study of a monarch whose motives were more often than not shrouded in secrecy, giving Philip an enigmatic aura which has persisted throughout history. His roles in the suppression of the Templar Order and in the Avignon Papacy has only added to that mystery. While the reviewer is by no means an expert on French history, he did finish the book eager to read more about Philip's life and times. This is an extremely challenging, but ultimately rewarding experience, and anyone who is curious to learn more about Philip is highly encouraged to try Strayer's masterpiece. For a more traditional biographical experience on two other notable French kings, Paul Murray Kendall's Louis XI: The Universal Spider and Frederic Baumgartner's Louis XII are two excellent choices with a much more accessible learning curve. I hope you enjoyed the review, thank you so very much for reading!