THE KINGDOM OF France was never a coherent territorial entity, what we would call a state, but, rather, a collection of lands, rights, and claims. Additionally, as the word “claims” implies, these were often contested. The ways in which they were advanced, realized, fought over, and lost are related to the nature of French society, however, as are the armies that were a vital element in the monarchy’s development.

Since the collapse of Rome monarchs had been, essentially, the rulers of the rich and powerful who controlled the day to day life of ordinary people. The power of emperors and kings rested on their ability to build up resources, to manipulate the great through patronage, and to overawe or even threaten them with military power. The wealth of the king and his control of government gave him the means to reward. Royal offices were highly prized: to be a count was prestigious and well rewarded, and also enabled its holder to exercise power in his own interests. Kings could give their own land, and sometimes that of the Church, to favoured servants. The king could also, of course, act as a judge in disputes between the great and be the guarantor of the legitimacy of those who held power. This process left powerful lords with virtual autonomy, however, especially in the counties they controlled. Even a monarch as powerful as Charlemagne inveighed angrily against those who misused the royal power to repress lesser men in his Memorandum on Military Matters of 811. These great men drew their wealth from landed estates on which they subjugated the peasantry to the status of serfs, a process very apparent in Carolingian times and even earlier. Kings were expected to lead in war, though a wise ruler would consult so as to ensure that the great men would follow him. Successful war gained loot and gave the king’s aristocratic followers employment for their armed retinues. Monarchy had great patronage, which could be used to manipulate others. Personality mattered a great deal, though, for power was exercised in a relatively small circle of individuals and radiated out from the royal court through the spheres of influence (mouvances) of each.

I OWE THANKS to many people for the help they have given me in preparing this book. The meetings of De Re Militari, the Society for Medieval Military History, have provided enormous stimulus over many years. More particularly, I would like to thank Clifford Rogers and Kelly DeVries, my colleagues on the editorial board of the Journal of Medieval Military History, for their kindness, patience, and great learning. Professors Bernard and David Bachrach have been a rich source of ideas. My colleagues in the History Department of Swansea University, Professor Dan Power and Dr. Simon Johns, have been enormously helpful. I can only admire the scholarly learning of Professor Matthew Strickland, to whose work I owe a very great deal. Dr. Alan V. Murray has been most generous in sharing knowledge and ideas. I owe a great deal to Dominique Barthélemy, whose knowledge of medieval France is remarkable. Federico Canaccini very kindly granted me the benefit of his learning, while Peter Herde made me think again about the Battle of Tagliacozzo.

Much of this book has been written during the extraordinary restrictions imposed by Covid-19. In spite of this, my family, and especially Angela, my wife, have coped with my struggles against these circumstances. Last, but not least, I must thank Anna Henderson of Arc Humanities Press, for all her help and the occasional – albeit tactful – prods, which have kept me going.

BY THE THIRTEENTH century the French army stood out as the supreme force in western Europe. The best indication of this is that, after 1214, most of its campaigns took place outside the borders of France. The wars of Louis VIII in the 1220s established royal domination in Provence and Languedoc, areas where it had been weak. Henry III Plantagenet’s attempts to recover his family lands were poorly managed and never in any real sense threatened the Capetian realm. The wars in Guyenne and Flanders at the end of our period were, essentially, the result of French aggression and overconfidence. Edward I had shown no signs of aggression and Philip IV simply seems to have tried to take advantage of his preoccupations within Britain to eliminate his territorial position in France, probably because for a king to do homage to another was always a difficult situation. Elsewhere French armies had conquered south Italy, were active in Frankish Greece, and dominated in the crusader states and Cyprus. This remarkable efflorescence of French power had many complex causes, but it clearly attests to the remarkable success of the French way of war. How and why had that come about?

The French royal army was, in principle, no different from that of any other power of northwest Europe. Medieval armies were very close reflections of the societies that produced them. A relatively poor society dominated by a narrow elite produced a precisely parallel kind of army— in the words of Contamine, an “occasional agglomeration of small autonomous forces.” By the end of the thirteenth century the monarchy had spelled out the military obligation of the population and could raise a much more cohesive force. The outcome of Courtrai was a defeat, but despite that the planning and control exerted by an able commander is very evident. This had come about, however, solely because military service to the monarch had become accepted.

The great nobles remained vital in mobilizing troops from among the petty nobility of their families and their dominions, though increasingly they had to accept the authority of the royal officers who supervised them. The mass of foot was recruited from the cities and the urban militia, augmented by mercenaries when necessary. In addition, a general belief that in time of necessity all freemen had an obligation to serve the king was emerging. The tightening of military obligation so evident in France in the late thirteenth century had English parallels, but no other western kingdom had managed to enforce such provisions so firmly and so widely. The political evolution of the French kingdom made this possible.

LOUIS VII’S SON, Philip, who assumed power when his father became ill and was then crowned in 1179 at the age of fourteen, was a very different personality. He also inherited a radically different situation. Louis VII had blocked the expansion of the Plantagenet empire and had shown that he could interfere in all parts of that great collection of lands. Even in the far south he was a factor in maintaining the independence of Toulouse. He had checked the ambitions of Frederick Barbarossa in the east and shown himself as the protector of noble powers there. Although he had not struck any fatal blow at Henry II, he had greatly curbed his ambitions. In addition, he had done all this with an ostentatious respect for noble privilege. This was a huge step forward from the situation he had inherited, and, while he had achieved no great accretion of royal demesne, his political activities were clearly backed by considerable wealth, derived from the economic expansion of the west.

The Early Reign

Because he was only fourteen, Philip was at first subject to the regency of Philip of Flanders, who had been a close ally of his father. The count strengthened his own position at the French court by arranging for Philip to marry Elizabeth of Hainaut, daughter of Count Baldwin V of Hainaut. As dowry of his wife, the young Philip was given considerable lands around Artois, though Count Philip was to retain control of them for his lifetime, and if there was no heir of the marriage they would revert to Elizabeth’s father, Baldwin count of Hainaut. King Philip soon resented the ascendancy at his court of the Flemish count. Tension grew, and in 1181 Count Philip demanded the return of the castle of Breteuil from Raoul of Clermont, who appealed to King Philip and hostilities began. Count Philip, supported by Baldwin of Hainaut, burned Noyon and ravaged entire countrysides, until he confronted the royal army at Crépy, but there was no battle and truces were made at the approach of Christmas. It is a mark of the prestige of the French monarchy that Henry the younger, heir of Henry II, in person and with a strong following of knights, supported the French king.

BOUVINES ESTABLISHED PHILIP as a major power in Europe, on a par with the emperor, and conferred great prestige upon his fighting forces. There were limits to its benefits within France, however. The rights of the great nobles continued to be respected, even those of Ferrand’s wife in Flanders, though Prince Louis exploited the county harshly. When Prince Louis, by then Louis VIII (1223– 1226), died unexpectedly in 1226 he left a child, and some of the nobles tried to exploit this situation, in what Dominique Barthélemy has called the “fronde des barons.” In fact, Barthélemy argues that the French king’s powers over the high nobility remained somewhat precarious until the time of St. Louis, but it is difficult to see how his reform of government would ever have been possible without Bouvines.

The Invasion of England

The truce at Chinon did not end the war with John, however, for victory created an appetite for more glory. In England many of the barons rebelled, driven by the financial exactions and the personal vindictiveness of John. In May they persuaded London to join them, forcing John to agree to the Magna Carta on June 15, 1215. By August 15, however, he was absolved from the obligations it placed on him by Innocent III, who was anxious to support, as he saw it, a vassal against rebels and a sworn crusader against those whose actions delayed his departure. England now fell into civil war, and many of the rebels appealed to Philip’ son, Prince Louis, to be their king. Philip and Louis delayed, however, while the rebels in London were inactive. John organized an efficient, largely mercenary army, which attacked Rochester on October 13. This was a very strong castle, whose great donjon still stands, but John pressed the siege. He mined one of the corner towers of the donjon, commanding his justiciar: “We order you to send to us night and day with all haste 40 bacon pigs of the fattest and those less good for eating to use for bringing fire under the tower.” To this day the result is visible, for, after the tower collapsed, it was rebuilt as a round tower, quite distinct from those on the other three sides.

Purpose and Range of This Book

FRENCH HISTORY IN the period under consideration can often appear totally shapeless, seeming to be “just one damned thing after another.” This is particularly true of its military history, in which major events and dramatic changes are rare. Additionally, of course, those who composed our sources had their own agendas, and what they tell us reflects their priorities. To understand the coherence of French military history we must always remember that war reflects the nature of the societies that wage it. At heart, this was an agrarian society that marched to the rhythm of the agriculture year. The elite seized most of the difference between what peasants produced and what they needed to live on. Hence there could be no standing army of any size, and this relative poverty meant that any large army that was gathered could not stay together for very long.

Essentially, the subject of our discussion is the inheritance of Charles the Bald (843– 877), the lands of the West Franks. His death was followed by a sequence of very short-lived descendants, and then a protracted period in which the territory was torn between the rival royal houses of the Carolingians and the Capetians. Yet, by the later thirteenth century, France was the dominant kingdom in Europe, and a branch of its Capetian ruling house governed the wealthy kingdom of Sicily. Its influence extended right across the Mediterranean to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which was protected by a French contribution to the garrison. A series of French popes ruled the Church, notably Martin IV (1281– 1285). By the end of the century royal power had totally eclipsed that of the great nobility and a process of royal centralization through a loyal bureaucracy was well under way.

This was an extraordinary rise, all the more so in that the inheritance of Charles the Bald was bitterly contested internally and, for a time, subject to violent external attack. Yet this entity held together, although Lorraine drifted to the empire and outposts in the Pyrenees to Spanish Christian kingdoms. These were only marginal losses, however, despite the fact that there was no obvious principle of unity.

The “Frankish” Roots of Kingship

THERE WAS NO single moment when “France” was invented. The name slowly came to be applied to the area ruled by the Capetian monarchs, the descendants of Odo of Paris. Before the late thirteenth century, though, it was never a coherent territorial entity but, rather, a collection of lands, rights, and claims presided over by them. It is interesting, however, that the Anglo Saxon Chronicle refers to the people who conquered England in 1066 as “French”. Suger, abbot of St. Denis, wrote a life of Louis VI (1108– 1137) in which he usually describes what we now call the Île de France— broadly, the area of Capetian domination between Seine and Loire— as Francia. Since he was close to the monarchy and a great supporter of Louis VI, it seems that he regarded this area as truly France. On the other hand, he sometimes speaks of broader territories as being Francia, notably referring to the events of 1124, when Louis VI led a resistance from all over Gaul to repel a German invasion. This seems to speak of both an actuality— the confinement of the monarchy to the Île de France— and a pretention, to a much wider dominion. The idea of France was emerging but it was very diffuse. We can certainly see Flanders as part of the French world, even though its counts were subjects of the German empire for some of their lands, while the Normans were effectively assimilated to French culture, as were the Bretons. After 1066 England became a French colony. So, in the search for the French army, the net can be cast widely.

When can we speak of a French monarchy, a French kingdom, a French people, or France? Essentially, France emerged out of a quite different identity, and even by the end of our period it barely resembled a nation in our sense of the word, in which people of a common language and culture live within defined frontiers under a single sovereign power. Yet a monarchy, around which modern France crystallized, did exist as a separate entity after 843: the portion of the Frankish Empire acquired by Charles the Bald.

The Early Reign

THE EARLY DEATH of Louis VIII in 1226 led to a regency by his very able wife, Blanche of Castile, for his young son, Louis IX (1226– 1270). The absence of an adult male successor inevitably opened the way to aristocratic factional struggle for influence over the young king— what Barthélemy has called the “fronde des barons.” Peter Mauclerc, duke of Brittany, and Philip Hurepel of Boulogne were both of Capetian stock; they and Theobald IV of Champagne were the primary forces in this internal conflict. Mauclerc was a special threat because his duchy had once been held of the Plantagenets, and Henry III was anxious to profit from internal struggles in France. All the competitors had different objectives, however. In 1226 Mauclerc rebelled, but submitted when the queen bought him off and raised a strong army, which she deployed into the Touraine to curb Hugh of Lusignan’s contacts with Henry III. Henry strove to raise an army, but his agents made a truce to last into 1228. In 1228, in alliance with Hurepel, Mauclerc kidnapped the child Louis IX. The militias of the towns of the Île de France rescued Louis. Louis cherished this memory, as John of Joinville, writing in the early fourteenth century, recalled of his journey back to Paris: “The roads had been thronged with people, armed and unarmed, all calling on our Lord to grant their young king a long and happy life and guard him from his enemies.” Mauclerc was again in rebellion in 1230, however, supported by discontented barons of Poitou and a major army led by Henry III. Henry had gathered an army in 1229, but there were insufficient ships to transport them across, and he and Mauclerc agreed to put the expedition off.

In 1230 Henry again raised an English army and landed at St. Malo. His force was perhaps smaller than intended because, before leaving, he sent 160 ships home. He set out for Nantes, where his army delayed. He probably knew that the French were in great difficulty. Theobald of Champagne was a major force whose influence on the regency, and boundary disputes with others, had inflamed tensions, especially with Hurepel, the count of Flanders, and the duke of Burgundy.