fiefs, and to get possession of estates and of power. After Charles the Bald’s death royalty had only, so to speak, a shell—administrative officialdom. No longer firmly rooted in the soil, the monarchy was helpless before local powers which confronted it, seized upon the land, and cut off connexion between throne and people. The king, the supreme lord, was the only lord without lands, a nomad in his own realms, merely lingering there until starved out. Feudalism claimed its new rights in the capitulary of Quierzy-sur-Oise in 857; the rights of the monarchy began to dwindle in 877.
But vassalage could only be a cause of disintegration, not of unity, and that this disintegration did not at once spread indefinitely was due to the dozen or so great military commands—Flanders, Burgundy, Aquitaine, &c.—which Charles the Bald had been obliged to establish on a strong territorial basis. One of these great vassals, the duke of France, was amply provided with estates and offices, in contrast to the landless Carolingian, and his power, like that of the future kings of Prussia and Austria, was based on military authority, for he had a frontier—that of Anjou. Then the inevitable crisis had come. For a hundred years the great feudal lords had disposed of the crown as they pleased, handing it back and forward from one dynasty to another. At the same time the contrast between the vast proportions of the Carolingian empire and its feeble administrative control over a still uncivilized community became more and more accentuated. The Empire crumbled away by degrees. Each country began to lead its own separate existence, stammering its own tongue; the different nations no longer understood one another, and no longer had any general ideas in common. The kingdoms of France and Germany, still too large, owed their existence to a series of dispossessions imposed on sovereigns too feeble to hold their own, and consisted of a great number of small states united by a very slight bond. At the end of the 10th century the duchy of France was the only central part of the kingdom which was still free and without organization. The end was bound to come, and the final struggle was between Laon, the royal capital, and Reims, the ecclesiastical capital, the former carrying with it the soil of France, and the latter the crown. The Capets captured the first in 985 and the other in 987. Thenceforth all was over for the Carolingians, who were left with no heritage save their great name.
Was the day won for the House of Capet? In the 11th century the kings of that line possessed meagre domains scattered about in the Île de France among the seigniorial possessions of Brie, Beauce, Beauvaisis and Valois. They were hemmed in by the powerful duchy of Normandy, the The House of Capet. counties of Blois, Flanders and Champagne, and the duchy of Burgundy. Beyond these again stretched provinces practically impenetrable to royal influence: Brittany, Gascony, Toulouse, Septimania and the Spanish March. The monarchy lay stifling in the midst of a luxuriant feudal forest which surrounded its only two towns of any importance: Paris, the city of the future, and Orleans, the city of learning. Its power, exercised with an energy tempered by prudence, ran to waste like its wealth in a suzerainty over turbulent vassals devoid of common government or administration, and was undermined by the same lack of social discipline among its vassals which had sapped the power of the Carolingians. The new dynasty was thus the poorest and weakest of the great civil and ecclesiastical lordships which occupied the country from the estuary of the Scheldt to that of the Llobregat, and bounded approximately by the Meuse, the Saône and the ridge of the Cévennes; yet it cherished a great ambition which it revealed at times during its first century (987–1108)—a determination not to repeat the Carolingian failure. It had to wait two centuries after the revolution of 987 before it was strong enough to take up the dormant tradition of an authority like that of Rome; and until then it cunningly avoided unequal strife in which, victory being impossible, reverses might have weakened those titles, higher than any due to feudal rights, conferred by the heritage of the Caesars and the coronation at Reims, and held in reserve for the future.
The new dynasty thus at first gave the impression rather of
decrepitude than of youth, seeming more a continuation of the
Carolingian monarchy than a new departure. Hugh
Capet’s reign was one of disturbance and danger;
behind his dim personality may be perceived the
Hugh Capet
(987–996).
struggle of greater forces—royalty and feudalism, the
French clergy and the papacy, the kingdom of France and the
Empire. Hugh Capet needed more than three years and the betrayal
of his enemy into his hands before he could parry the attack
of a quite second-rate adversary, Charles of Lorraine (990), the
last descendant of Charlemagne. The insubordination of several
great vassals—the count of Vermandois, the duke of Burgundy,
the count of Flanders—who treated him as he had treated the
Carolingian king; the treachery of Arnulf, archbishop of Reims,
who let himself be won over by the empress Theophano; the
papal hostility inflamed by the emperor against the claim of
feudal France to independence,—all made it seem for a time
as though the unity of the Roman empire of the West would
be secured at Hugh’s expense and in Otto’s favour; but as
a matter of fact this papal and imperial hostility ended by
making the Capet dynasty a national one. When Hugh died
in 996, he had succeeded in maintaining his liberty mainly, it
is true, by diplomacy, not force, despite opposing powers and
his own weakness. Above all, he had secured the future by
associating his son Robert with him on the throne; and although
the nobles and the archbishop of Reims were disturbed by this
suspension of the feudal right of election, and tried to oppose it,
they were unsuccessful.
Robert the Pious, a crowned monk, resembled his father in eschewing great schemes, whether from timidity or prudence; yet from 996 to 1031 he preserved intact the authority he had inherited from Hugh, despite many domestic disturbances. He maintained a defiant attitude towards Robert the Pious (996–1031). Germany; increased his heritage; strengthened his royal title by the addition of that of duke of Burgundy after fourteen years of pillage; and augmented the royal domain by adding several countships on the south-east and north-west. Limited in capacity, he yet understood the art of acquisition.
Henry I., his son, had to struggle with a powerful vassal,
Eudes, count of Chartres and Troyes, and was obliged for a time
to abandon his father’s anti-German policy. Eudes,
who was rash and adventurous, in alliance with the
queen-mother, supported the second son, Robert,
Henry I.
(1031–1060).
and captured the royal town of Sens. In order to
retake it Henry ceded the beautiful valley of the Saône and the
Rhône to the German emperor Conrad, and henceforth the
kingdom of Burgundy was, like Lorraine, to follow the fortunes
of Germany. Henry had besides to invest his brother with the
duchy of Burgundy—a grave error which hampered French
politics during three centuries. Like his father, he subsequently
managed to retrieve some of the crown lands from William the
Bastard, the too-powerful duke of Normandy; and he made
a praiseworthy though fruitless attempt to regain possession
of Lorraine for the French crown. Finally, by the coronation
of his son Philip (1059) he confirmed the hereditary right of the
Capets, soon to be superior to the elective rights of the bishops
and great barons of the kingdom. The chief merit of these
early Capets, indeed, was that they had sons, so that their
dynasty lasted on without disastrous minorities or quarrels
over the division of inheritance.
Philip I. achieved nothing during his long reign of forty-eight
years except the necessary son, Louis the Fat. Unsuccessful
even in small undertakings he was utterly incapable
of great ones; and the two important events of his
reign took place, the one against his will, the other
Philip I.
(1060–1108).
without his help. The first, which lessened Norman
aggression in his kingdom, was William the Bastard’s conquest
of England (1066); the second was the First Crusade preached
by the French pope Urban II. (1095). A few half-hearted
campaigns against recalcitrant vassals and a long and obstinate
quarrel with the papacy over his adulterous union with Bertrade
de Montfort, countess of Anjou, represented the total activity
