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, Hardcover

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 Reece · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

Philip IV Capet, called the Fair, was born in 1268 at the Palace of Fontainebleau southeast of Paris, & throughout his twenty-nine year reign he played a role in several momentous historical events, such as the dissolution of the Templar Order which began on Friday, 13 October 1307 with the apprehension on false heresy accusations of hundreds of Templars, including their Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, & the Babylonian Captivity, which was when the Catholic Church's central administration was relocated to Avignon, France from 1309-1376 following the chaos resulting from his arrest of Pope Boniface VIII at Anagni in 1303 with the aid of Rome's powerful Colonna clan. Philip's grim demeanor & unyielding attitudes in regard to politics led him to garner the sobriquet, 'The Iron King', & he remained aloof from his subjects, preferring to conduct his policies through trusted, high-placed administrators such as Guillaume de Nogaret & Enguerrand de Marigny. Joseph R. Strayer's erudite study explores Philip's reign using a comprehensive, scholarly approach that focuses on a variety of relevant subjects, including the king's early life & family affiliations, the men who comprised his governmental personnel, his administration, his relationship with the Catholic Church, & his wars in Aquitaine & Flanders.

This 2019 reprinting of Joseph R. Strayer's 1980 study, The Reign of Philip the Fair is published by Princeton University Press as part of the Princeton Legacy Library & consists of a 423-page main text that is divided into six lengthy chapters with a fourteen-page bibliography of English & French sources, & an index at the end of the volume. Chapters one, four, & five are narrative-based & more or less tell the story of Philip's life & reign, while chapters two & three are devoted to such topics as biographies of the careers of Philip's key councilors & advisers (chapter two) & the different aspects of Philip's administration & the parts & divisions of his bureaucracy (chapter three), such as financial, municipal, legal, etc. Chapter six is a detailed synopsis of Philip's relationship with his people, including such topics as royal propaganda, the effect on his subjects of his onerous taxation & currency manipulation, his attempts to provide reason & explanation for his policy & decisions to his subjects using assemblies, & the country's fervent belief in what is referred to by the author as the "royal religion".

Chapter 1, The King & His Family is a brief but fascinating narrative of Philip's early life & reign, stressing the crucial role that events outside his control played in influencing the king's character & personality. In the chapter's first paragraphs, Strayer provides a series of fascinating statements which testify to Philip's uniquely enigmatic legacy & beg the reader to ponder their significance as the study proceeds: "Philip the Fair is a hard man to get to know. His contemporaries were puzzled by him, & 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 & sudden flashes of anger; he was loyal to his friends; he showed stubborn courage in times of adversity; & he had strong, if peculiar, convictions about morality & 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 & for the dignity & 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, & his father, Philip III, remarried, to Marie de Brabant, & Marie was more concerned with advancing the interests of her own offspring than she was with spending time with the child of her husband's previous marriage.

In Chapter 2, The King & His Officers, Professor Strayer divides Philip's administration into four categories of officials, before providing a cursory overview of each -- the high officials based in Paris, the supporting staff in Paris, the high-ranking provincial officials, & the lower-ranking local officials. Older kings had appointed their officers from regions that had been under the suzerainty of the crown for long periods of time, eschewing the newer areas that had only recently been added to the royal domain, such as Normandy & Languedoc, but Philip changed this trend somewhat. He still employed the 'old guard', but his trust in them was tenuous at best, & he preferred to add a number of 'new men' to his administration whose loyalties were tied to him, as evinced by the following excerpt: "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." Many different motivations drove the men who Philip employed in his bureaucracy -- the acquisition of wealth, a sense of obligation to the monarchy, being affiliated with the king, the pursuit of power -- this last motivation is spoken of eloquently by the author in the following passage: "This is a strong force; men have always been willing to sacrifice ease, comfort, & even wealth in order to achieve power. Philip's agents had the authority of the king behind them. They could give orders to counts & bishops; they could collect vast sums of money from all classes of society; they could investigate the activities & determine the rights of nobles, clergy & communes. Their acts could be reversed only by higher officials or by the king himself." This chapter focuses on the careers of notable council members in Philip's administration, including Guillaume de Nogaret, Enguerrand de Marigny, & Pierre Flot, their backgrounds, motivations, & salaries.

The administration of Philip the Fair was a multi-faceted bureaucratic institution, & Chapter 3, The King & the Administration of the Realm explores every aspect of his government, from France's division into different districts, the titles of which changed from region to region, such as the bailiages, the sénéchaussées, & the viscounties, to the personnel who administered these areas. During this period France was split into a confusing array of provinces, territories, & regions, & the titles for these different areas were not uniform throughout the country. In the north part of France, referred to by the author as the 'old royal domain', the territory was split into administrative areas, called bailiages, & they were each under the supervision of an official, called a bailii. Each bailiage was further split into different districts which were known as prévôtés, & these units were under the jurisdiction of another official, the prévôt. In the southern portion of France it was different, as the administrative areas were known as sénéchaussées, which were overseen by a different-named official, usually born into the nobility, called a seneschal, & these regions were subdivided into three different types of districts that varied by location, which were called baylies, viguieries, & jugeries. Later in the chapter Strayer discusses the financial aspects of the reign, including 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 & royal officials (totaling 890,000 livres of Tours in this particular instance), among many others. The extraordinary measures resorted to by Philip to raise additional income are also explored, such as his dilution of the currency at the end of the thirteenth century & his one tenth tax on the clergy, which the author comments on in the following excerpt: "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 is simply colossal -- it constitutes 142 pages of the study & the amount of information to be found here is just mind-boggling -- the author covers everything from the division of the treasury into two different departments, the Treasury of the Temple & the Treasury of the Louvre, each with its own head treasurers, to the amount of Templar property which was actually gained by Philip's suppression of the order in 1307, a mere 260,000 livres of tours, as well as short biographies & career sketches of the intelligent, capable men who administered Philip's finances. This is a challenging chapter to undertake, & this 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 readers to enjoy learning about this remarkable French monarch.

The conflict between Philip the Fair & Pope Boniface VIII is discussed in Chapter 4, The King & the Church, & it began over contestation of the Languedoc province, an area over which the pope's spiritual authority & the king's temporal control were considered tenuous at best, as the region had borne more than its fair share of political unrest in the past 100 years, with the Albigensian Crusade occurring in the early thirteenth century & continuing with the ongoing struggle between the Spiritual Franciscans & the Inquisition during the reign of Philip. Boniface's enemies, the Roman Colonna clan, had married into families in the Languedoc nobility & settled there, which compounded the level of the pope's exasperation with the territory & added to Philip's problems as Languedoc was frequently in danger of rebellion throughout his 29-year rule. Both sides, according to Strayer, were searching for a reason to begin a conflict, & in the case of Bernard Saisset, the bishop of Pmaiers, the king finally found his excuse. Saisset was accused of making a series of disrespectful remarks about the French monarchy in general & about the king personally, who was sufficiently annoyed to the extent where he detained & questioned Saisset's staff & associates. The bishop was eventually released, but he had become a tangible manifestation of the fundamental disagreement between the king & the pope, & their relations worsened, eventually causing Pope Boniface to issue controversial edicts, called papal bulls, which attempted to assert the Catholic Church's temporal as well as spiritual sovereignty over the French monarchy, & ultimately the entire country. One of these edicts was entitled Ausculta Fili, & Strayer provides a summary of its basic concepts & accompanies it with his own fascinating interpretations, while for another, Unam sanctam, he provides a quotation from the conclusion of the bull that speaks to its imperious purpose, which basically mandated that all of humanity was subject to the Roman Pontiff in order to receive its salvation. Also discussed is another bull, equally unpopular with Philip & his advisors, called Clericos laicos, which outlawed all clerical contributions to any lay government, not just Philip's administration, so the clerical tenths of the French clergy being paid out to the French government were temporarily halted.

Also discussed in chapter four is Philip's famous clash with the Templar Order over a number of issues, which ultimately led to its suppression & dissolution from 1307-1312. Strayer presents an array of fascinating hypotheses in regard to why exactly this elimination of a religious order of knights occurred, & they revolve around three basic theories -- one, Philip needed money, as his scheme of diluting the French currency had run full circle & he was searching for ways to produce "good money", as the author refers to it, to replace the "weak money" he had unleashed on the French economy during the 1290's; two, Philip genuinely believed that the Templar Order was practicing heretical beliefs, & he managed to convince Pope Boniface VIII's one-removed successor, Clement V, who was a Frenchman, that this was so; & three, Philip believed it would increase his prestige to have been sufficiently vigilant to uncover heretical practices before the Pope & thus elevate his status as a pious monarch, as the king had a prerogative to appear as such, which was associated with his own self-perception of himself within the Roman Catholic Church. Strayer describes his third theory in the following excerpt: "Finally, some benefit was gained by portraying the king as a champion of orthodoxy, quicker than the pope to detect the heresy & far more zealous in suppressing it." Overall, chapter four limns to the reader a remarkably detailed story of Philip's complex relationship with the church & the Templars, somehow managing to not only explain the intricacies of the subject matter but also to introduce the author's very interesting theories & hypotheses concerning the reasons for the way the situations unfolded in the manner that they did. There is additional information at the end of the chapter on 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 & some fascinating information on what exactly transpired during the proceedings that add nicely to the rest of this wonderfully written chapter. Chapter 5, The King & His Neighbors discusses Philip's military campaigns in the Aquitaine & Flanders regions & his relationship with the Holy Roman Empire. There is a short section on the French Armies which highlights Philip's military chain of command & briefly discusses the careers of several prominent soldier captains who served in Aquitaine & 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 & His People is a narrative summary on a variety of different topics relating to the way Philip & his administration interacted with & were perceived by the people over whom they governed, among them the concept of the king's inseparable attachment to the Francie Regnum, or French Kingdom, & how the king was able to justify the heavy taxation & other measures he would resort to in an effort to acquire additional funds. Philip's costly wars & his economic manipulation took a heavy toll on his people, but they still held him in relatively high regard despite all of it, as this passage speaks eloquently to: "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 & political skill of the government. Careful negotiation & timely compromise calmed most of the people who were offended by the king's demands." Despite his subject's tolerance of his unpleasant political & economic tactics, Philp the Fair was never a well-liked ruler. He used popular assemblies in an effort to gauge public reaction to whatever he was planning at the time & to present an image of himself which was in line with royal propaganda, as well as to attempt to provide reasoning for his controversial acts such as his arrest of the Pope & his suppression of the Templar Order. Despite all of these shortcomings, he did leave France in a good position by the end of his reign, & Strayer speaks here to his lasting legacy: "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 & 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 & mystery, giving Philip an enigmatic aura that has persisted throughout history. His roles in the suppression of the Templar Order & the Avignon Papacy & the quotations of contemporaries such as Bernard Saisset who lived during his reign has added to that mystique, & Philip the Fair will perhaps never be truly understood by modern readers in the way that his closest confidants & advisors, such as Guillaume de Nogaret & Enguerrand de Marigny, knew this shadowy figure. While this reviewer is by no means an expert on this particular area of French history, he did finish the book eager to read more about Philip's life & times. This is an extremely challenging, but ultimately rewarding experience, & anyone who is curious to learn more about Philip is highly encouraged to try Strayer's masterpiece & find out for themselves how much tremendous hard work, dedication & polish was obviously administered in the writing of it. For a more traditional biographical experience on two other notable French kings, Paul Murray Kendall's Louis XI: The Universal Spider & 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 much for reading!

[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.