Philip IV of France

Youth

A member of the House of Capet, Philip was born in the medieval fortress of Fontainebleau (Seine-et-Marne) to the future Philip III, the Bold and his first wife, Isabella of Aragon. He was the second of four sons born to the couple. His father was the heir apparent of France at that time, being the eldest son of King Louis IX (better known as St. Louis).

In August 1270, when Philip was two years old, his grandfather died while on Crusade, his father became king, and his elder brother Louis became heir apparent. Only five months later, in January 1271, Philip's mother died after falling from a horse; she was pregnant with her fifth child at the time and had not yet been crowned queen beside her husband. A few months later, one of Philip's younger brothers, Robert, also died. Philip's father was finally crowned king at Rhiems on 15 August 1271. Six days later, he married again; Philip's step-mother was Marie, daughter of the duke of Brabant.

In May 1276, Philip's elder brother Louis died, and the eight year old Philip became crown prince. It was suspected that Louis had been poisoned, and that his stepmother, Marie of Brabant, had instigated the murder. One reason for these rumours was the fact that the queen had given birth to her own first son in the same month as the death of the crown prince. However, both Philip and his surviving full brother Charles lived well into adulthood and raised large families of their own.

The scholastic part of Philip's education was entrusted to Guillaume d'Ercuis, his father's almoner.

After the unsuccessful Aragonese Crusade against Peter III of Aragon, which ended in October 1285, and just before his father's death, the 17-year old Philip negotiated the safe passage across the Pyrenees mountains: safe conduct was granted to members of the royal family, but not to the troops.

Philip married Queen Joan I of Navarre (1271–1305) on 16 August 1284. The primary administrative benefit of this was Joan's inheritance of Champagne and Brie, which were adjacent to the royal demesne in Ile-de-France, and thus effectively were united to the king's own lands, expanding his realm. Philip also gained Lyon for France in 1312.

Navarre remained in personal union with France, beginning in 1284 under Philip and Joan, for 44 years. The kingdom of Navarre in the Pyrenees was not considered to be of great importance to contemporary interests of the French crown. However, in 1328, when the Capetian line went extinct, the new Valois king, Philip VI, attempted to permanently annex the lands to France, compensating the lawful claimant, Joan II of Navarre, senior heir of Philip IV, with lands elsewhere in France. However, pressure from Joan II's family led to Phillip VI surrendering the land to Joan in 1329, and the rulers of Navarre and France were again different individuals.

Reign

After marrying Joan I of Navarre, becoming Philip I of Navarre, Philip ascended the French throne the age of 17. He was crowned on January 6, in 1286 in Rheims. As king, Philip was determined to strengthen the monarchy at any cost. He relied, more than any of his predecessors, on a professional bureaucracy of legalists. To the public he kept aloof, and left specific policies, especially unpopular ones, to his ministers; as such he was called a "useless owl" by his contemporaries, among them Bishop Saisset. His reign marks the transition in France from a charismatic monarchy – which could all but collapse in an incompetent reign – to a more bureaucratic kingdom, a move, under a certain historical reading, towards modernity.

War with the English

As the duke of Aquitaine, English King Edward I was a vassal to Philip, and had to pay him homage. Following the Fall of Acre in 1291, however, the former allies started to show dissent.

In 1293, following a naval incident between the English and the Normans, Philip summoned Edward to the French court. The English king sought to negotiate the matter via ambassadors sent to Paris, but they were turned away with a blunt refusal. Philip addressed Edward as a duke, a vassal and nothing more, despite their relationhip having international implications for the relationship between England and France, and not being an internal matter involving Philip's French vassals.

Edward next attempted to use family connections to achieve what open politics had not. He sent his brother Edmund Crouchback, who was Philip's cousin as well as his step-father-in-law, to attempt to negotiate with the French royal family and avert war. Additionally, Edward had by that time become betrothed by proxy to Philip's sister Blanche, and, in the event of the negotiations being successful, Edmund was to escort Blanche back to England for her wedding to Edward.

An agreement was indeed reached; it stated that Edward would voluntarily relinquish his continental lands to Philip as a sign of submission in his capacity as the duke of Aquitaine. In return, Philip would forgive Edward and restore his land after a grace period. In the matter of the marriage, Philip drove a hard bargain based partially on the difference in age between Edward and Blanche; it was agreed that the province of Gascony would be retained by Philip in return for agreeing to the marriage. The date of the wedding was also put off until the formality of sequestering and re-granting the French lands back to Edward was completed.

But Edward, Edmund and the English had been deceived. The French had no intention of returning the land to the English monarch. Edward kept up his part of the deal and turned over his continental estates to the French. However, Philip used the pretext that the English king had refused his summons in order to strip Edward of all his possessions in France, thereby initiating hostilities with England.

The outbreak of hostilities with England in 1294 was the inevitable result of the competitive expansionist monarchies, triggered by a secret Franco-Scottish pact of mutual assistance against Edward I; inconclusive campaigns for the control of Gascony, southwest of France were fought 1294–1298 and 1300–1303. Philip gained Guienne but was later forced to return it. The search for income to cover military expenditures set its stamp on Philip's reign and his reputation at the time.

Pursuant to the terms of the Treaty of Paris in 1303, the marriage of Philip's daughter Isabella to the Prince of Wales, Edward I's heir, was celebrated at Boulogne, 25 January 1308 was meant to seal a peace; instead it would produce an eventual English claimant to the French throne itself, and the Hundred Years' War.

In Flanders

Philip suffered a major embarrassment when an army of 2,500 noble men-at-arms (knights and squires) and 4,000 infantry he sent to suppress an uprising in Flanders was defeated in the Battle of the Golden Spurs near Kortrijk on 11 July 1302. Philip reacted with energy to the humiliation and the Battle of Mons-en-Pévèle followed two years later, which ended in a decisive French victory. Consequently, in 1305, Philip forced the Flemish to accept a harsh peace treaty; the peace exacted heavy reparations and humiliating penalties, and added to the royal territory the rich cloth cities of Lille, Douai, and Bethune, sites of major cloth fairs. Béthune, first of the Flemish cities to yield, was granted to Mahaut, Countess of Artois, whose two daughters, to secure her fidelity, were married to Philip's two sons.

Finance and Religion

By the turn of the century, Philip was faced with increasing expenses and extensive financial liabilities, partially inherited from his father's war against Aragon and partly incurred by the cost of his own campaigns against the English and their allies in Flanders. In the shorter term, he used less-than-honorable means to try secure the funding he felt he needed. First, he arrested Jews so that he could seize their assets to accommodate the inflated costs of modern warfare, expelling them from his French territories on 22 July 1306.

While King Edward had ordered the Jews to leave England in 1290. Philip, the Iron King, expelled the Jews from France in July of 1306. With the Jews gone, Philip appointed royal guardians to collect the loans made by the Jews, and the money was passed to the Crown. The scheme did not work well. The Jews were regarded as honest, good businessmen who satisfied their customers, while the king's collectors were universally unpopular. Finally, in 1315, because of the "clamour of the people", the Jews were invited back with an offer of 12 years of guaranteed residence, free from government interference. In 1322, the Jews were expelled again by the King's successor, who did not honour his commitment.

Philip IV's financial activities were not necessarily anti-semitic, however, as his financial victims included Jews and Christians, wealthy and poor, clergy and lay people. A second group of targets consisted of rich abbots and Lombard merchants, who had earlier made him extensive loans on the pledge of repayment from future taxation. Like the Jews, the Lombard bankers were expelled from France and their property expropriated. In addition to these measures, Philip debased the French coinage, which had a harsh impact on all less-wealthy people of France. By 1306 this practice led to a two-thirds loss in the value of the livres, sous and deniers in circulation. This financial crisis led to rioting in Paris which forced Philip to briefly seek refuge in the Paris Temple - headquarters of the Knights Templar.

Philip was condemned by his enemy, Pope Boniface VIII in the Catholic Church for his spendthrift lifestyle. When he also levied taxes on the French clergy of one half their annual income, he caused an uproar within the Roman Catholic Church and the papacy, prompting Pope Boniface VIII to issue the bull Clericis Laicos (1296), forbidding the transference of any church property to the French Crown. This prompted a drawn-out diplomatic battle between Church and King.

Philip convoked an assembly of bishops, nobles and grand bourgeois of Paris in order to condemn the Pope. This precursor to the Etats Généraux appeared for the first time during his reign, a measure of the professionalism and order that his ministers were introducing into government. This assembly, which was composed of clergy, nobles, and burghers, gave support to Philip. Boniface retaliated with the celebrated bull Unam Sanctam (1302), a declaration of papal supremacy. Philip emerged victorious, after having sent his agent William Nogaret to arrest Boniface at Anagni. The pope escaped but died soon afterward. The French archbishop Bertrand de Goth was elected pope as Clement V and thus began the so-called Babylonian Captivity of the papacy (1309–77), during which the official seat of the papacy moved to Avignon, an enclave surrounded by French territories, and was subjected to French control.

Suppression of the Knights Templar

Philip was substantially in debt to the Knights Templar, a monastic military order whose original role as protectors of Christian pilgrims in the Latin East had been largely replaced by banking and other commercial activities by the end of the 13th century. As the popularity of the Crusades had decreased, support for the military orders had waned, and Philip used a disgruntled complaint against the Knights Templar as an excuse to move against the entire organization as it existed in France, in part to free himself from his debts. Other motives appear to have included concern over perceived heresy, assertion of French control over a weakened Papacy and finally, the substitution of royal officials for officers of the Temple in the financial management of French government. Recent studies emphasize the political and religious motivations of Philip the Fair and his ministers (especially Guillaume de Nogaret). It seems that, with the “discovery” and repression of the “Templars' heresy,” the Capetian monarchy claimed for itself the mystic foundations of the papal theocracy. The Temple case was the last step of a process of appropriating these foundations, which had begun with the Franco-papal rift at the time of Boniface VIII. Being the ultimate defender of the Catholic faith, the Capetian king was invested with a Christlike function that put him above the pope. What was at stake in the Templars' trial, then, was the establishment of a "royal theocracy".

At daybreak on Friday, 13 October 1307, hundreds of Templars in France were simultaneously arrested by agents of Philip the Fair, to be later tortured into admitting heresy in the Order. The Templars were supposedly answerable to only the Pope, but Philip used his influence over Clement V, who was largely his pawn, to disband the organization. Pope Clement did attempt to hold proper trials, but Philip used the previously forced confessions to have many Templars burned at the stake before they could mount a proper defense.

In March 1314, Philip had Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Temple, and Geoffroi de Charney, Preceptor of Normandy, burned at the stake. The account goes as follows:

The cardinals dallied with their duty until March 1314, (exact day is disputed by scholars) when, on a scaffold in front of Notre Dame, Jacques de Molay, Templar Grand Master, Geoffroi de Charney, Master of Normandy, Hugues de Peraud, Visitor of France, and Godefroi de Gonneville, Master of Aquitaine, were brought forth from the jail in which for nearly seven years they had lain, to receive the sentence agreed upon by the cardinals, in conjunction with the Archbishop of Sens and some other prelates whom they had called in. Considering the offenses, which the culprits had confessed and confirmed, the penance imposed was in accordance with rule — that of perpetual imprisonment. The affair was supposed to be concluded when, to the dismay of the prelates and wonderment of the assembled crowd, de Molay and Geoffroi de Charney arose. They had been guilty, they said, not of the crimes imputed to them, but of basely betraying their Order to save their own lives. It was pure and holy; the charges were fictitious and the confessions false. Hastily the cardinals delivered them to the Prevot of Paris, and retired to deliberate on this unexpected contingency, but they were saved all trouble. When the news was carried to Philippe he was furious. A short consultation with his council only was required. The canons pronounced that a relapsed heretic was to be burned without a hearing; the facts were notorious and no formal judgment by the papal commission need be waited for. That same day, by sunset, a stake was erected on a small island in the Seine, the Ile des Juifs, near the palace garden. There de Molay and de Charney were slowly burned to death, refusing all offers of pardon for retraction, and bearing their torment with a composure which won for them the reputation of martyrs among the people, who reverently collected their ashes as relics.

The fact that, in little more than a month, Pope Clement V died in torment of a loathsome disease thought to be lupus, and that in eight months Philip IV of France, at the early age of forty-six, perished by an accident while hunting, necessarily gave rise to the legend that de Molay had cited them before the tribunal of God. Such stories were rife among the people, whose sense of justice had been scandalized by the whole affair. Even in distant Germany, Philip's death was spoken of as a retribution for his destruction of the Templars, and Clement was described as shedding tears of remorse on his death-bed for three great crimes: the poisoning of Henry VII, Holy Roman Emperor, and the ruin of the Templars and Beguines. Within 14 years the throne passed rapidly through Philip's sons, who died relatively young, and without producing male heirs. By 1328, his male line was extinguished, and the throne had passed to the line of his brother, the House of Valois.

Tour de Nesle affair

In 1314, the daughters-in-law of Philip IV, Margaret of Burgundy (wife of Louis X) and Blanche of Burgundy (wife of Charles IV) were accused of adultery, and their alleged lovers (Phillipe d'Aunay and Gauthier d'Aunay) tortured, flayed and executed in what has come to be known as the Tour de Nesle Affair (French: Affaire de la tour de Nesle). A third daughter-in-law, Joan II, Countess of Burgundy (wife of Philip V), was accused of knowledge of the affairs.

Crusades and diplomacy with Mongols

Philip had various contacts with the Mongol power in the Middle East, including reception at the embassy of the Uyghur monk Rabban Bar Sauma, originally from the Yuan dynasty of China. Bar Sauma presented an offer of a Franco-Mongol alliance with Arghun of the Mongol Ilkhanate in Baghdad. Arghun was seeking to join forces between the Mongols and the Europeans, against their common enemy the Muslim Mamluks. In return, Arghun offered to return Jerusalem to the Christians, once it was re-captured from the Muslims. Philip seemingly responded positively to the request of the embassy, by sending one of his noblemen, Gobert de Helleville, to accompany Bar Sauma back to Mongol lands. There was further correspondence between Arghun and Philip in 1288 and 1289, outlining potential military cooperation. However, Philip never actually pursued such military plans.

In April 1305, the new Mongol ruler Öljaitü sent letters to Philip, the Pope, and Edward I of England. He again offered a military collaboration between the Christian nations of Europe and the Mongols against the Mamluks. European nations attempted another Crusade but were delayed, and it never took place. On 4 April 1312, another Crusade was promulgated at the Council of Vienne. In 1313, Philip "took the cross", making the vow to go on a Crusade in the Levant, thus responding to Pope Clement V's call. He was, however, warned against leaving by Enguerrand de Marigny and died soon after in a hunting accident.

Death

Philip IV's rule signaled the decline of the papacy's power from its near complete authority. His palace located on the Île de la Cité is represented today by surviving sections of the Conciergerie. He suffered a cerebral stroke during a hunt at Pont-Sainte-Maxence (Forest of Halatte), and died a few weeks later, on 29 November 1314, at Fontainebleau, where he was born. He is buried in the Basilica of St Denis. He was succeeded by his son Louis X.

Issue

The children of Philip IV of France and Joan I of Navarre were:

1. Margaret (ca. 1288, Paris – after November 1294, Paris). Died in childhood, but betrothed in November 1294 (aged six) to Infante Ferdinand of Castile, later Ferdinand IV of Castile.
2. Louis X – ( 4 October 1289 – 5 June 1316)
3. Blanche (1290, Paris– after 13 April 1294, Saint Denis). Died in childhood, but betrothed in December 1291 (aged one) to Infante Ferdinand of Castile, later Ferdinand IV of Castile. Blanche was buried in the Basilica of St Denis.
4. Philip V – (1292/93–3 January 1322)
5. Charles IV – (1294–1 February 1328)
6. Isabella – (c. 1295–23 August 1358). Married Edward II of England and was the mother of Edward III of England. This makes Philip IV the maternal grandfather of Edward III of England and an ancestor of every English king after Edward II.
7. Robert (1297, Paris – August 1308, Saint Germain-en-Laye). The Flores historiarum of Bernard Guidonis names "Robertum" as youngest of the four sons of Philip IV of France, adding that he died "in flore adolescentiæ suæ" and was buried "in monasterio sororum de Pyssiaco" in August 1308. Betrothed in October 1306 (aged nine) to Constance of Sicily.

All three of Philip's sons who reached adulthood became kings of France, and Isabella, his only surviving daughter, was the queen of England as consort to Edward II of England.

In fiction

Dante Alighieri often refers to Philip in La Divina Commedia, never by name but as the "mal di Francia" (plague of France).

Philip is the title character in Le Roi de fer (The Iron King), the 1955 first novel in Les Rois maudits (The Accursed Kings), a series of French historical novels by Maurice Druon. He was portrayed by Georges Marchal in the 1972 French miniseries adaptation of the series, and by Tchéky Karyo in the 2005 adaptation.