Seven Ages of Paris by Alistair Horne Read Free Book Online

obtained an annulment from the Pope on the ground that he and Eleanor were too closely related. Two years later, a free Eleanor married Henry Plantagenet, the future Henry II of England, a potent and ruthless warlord many years younger than herself. She was to live to be eighty-two, and to give Henry not only a number of illustrious sons but, more important, Aquitaine, or suzerainty over half of the territory that Louis le Gros had bequeathed France. With it came a casus belli for what French historians call the “first” Hundred Years War.
    Hardly was Suger cold in the grave than all the political achievements of Louis le Gros began to fall apart. Within ten years of Suger’s death, Louis VII had been defeated in battle by his rival for Eleanor, and had lost Brittany and Toulouse as well. By the end of his forty-three-year reign he had managed to reduce France geographically to what she had been in the time of the first Capetians, throwing to the winds—or, rather, to his rival in love—his father’s legacy of rich Aquitaine.
    Louis had two daughters, supposedly, by Eleanor—but no heir. He remarried, but his second wife died childless. His third wife, Alix of Champagne, in 1165 finally produced a son who—fifteen years later—was to become Philippe II. Consciously mirroring the Roman emperor who gave his name to the month, he was named Auguste because he had been born in August. As well as the crown of France, to young Philippe Auguste was also bequeathed as a legacy the priceless foundation work of Suger, of the twelfth-century Renaissance, which would come to be seen as a true golden age for France, and for Paris.
    Age One
    1180–1314
    *
    PHILIPPE AUGUSTE
    Lutetia, under the Romans (© Gianni Dagli Orti/Corbis)
    Click here to see a larger image.
    ONE
    *
    Sunday at Bouvines
    I only wish this pile of stones could be silver, gold or diamonds … the more precious the materials of this castle, the greater pleasure I will have in possessing it when it falls into my hands.
    PRINCE PHILIPPE (LATER KING PHILIPPE AUGUSTE), AGED NINE, IN 1174
    THE BUILD-UP
    Some important battles in history have a surreptitious way of crystallizing what has gone before, as well as putting down a kind of marker for what is about to occur. They can also affect the pattern of events far beyond the battlefield itself. It is perhaps what makes historians call them “decisive.” Bouvines, fought on 27 July 1214, was one of those. It was won by France against a powerful coalition of foes headed by King John of England, on a Sunday. This in itself was unusual, for in those days of religious correctness knights and kings on the whole observed the sabbath as far as battle was concerned. Bouvines was, moreover, to set the future shape not only of France but of Britain, too—and it would be fundamental to the development of the capital city Paris was to become. Some fifteen kilometres equidistant from the present-day cities of Tournai (in Belgium) and France’s Lille, Bouvines lies in soggy Flanders, site of the terrible battlefields where the destiny of France was to be played out exactly seven centuries later, 200 kilometres north-east of Paris.
    When France’s King Philippe Auguste arrived on the throne in 1180,* aged fifteen, he inherited a tiny state, a fraction the size of Plantagenet England and its European dependencies, land-locked and surrounded by powerful rivals. How then did he come to find himself fighting—and winning—such a key battle in so unpromising a corner of Europe?
    The then King of England, Henry II, was an imposing, authoritarian ruler who, at least in the early stages of his reign, seemed to have everything going for him. His French father, the Plantagenet Duc d’Anjou, brought him the rich territories of Anjou and Normandy; and he acquired England through his marriage to the unhappy Matilda, heiress to William the Conqueror’s son Henry I. Between Matilda and her cousin King Stephen, England had been reduced to