Philip IV and the persecution mentality
But why would Philip IV humiliate his family in such spectacular fashion? His psychology has been the source of much speculation, with a special interest in the extent to which the king thought for himself or was commanded by his counselors.
As we have seen, even during his own lifetime some regarded him as tool, and the view is widely although not unanimously shared among contemporary historians.[75]More significant, however, a general consensus holds that the king strove throughout his reign to sacralize the monarchy and that he himself was blindly self-righteousness. His lifelong attempts to portray himself as worthy of his grandfather, Saint Louis, are well attested.72 E. A. R. Brown points out the “unprecedented insistence on the connection between the king’s causes and those of God and Jesus Christ” in the documents diffused by the king’s chancellery and, as further evidence of Philip’s exalted opinion of the royalty and himself, notes that the king touched for scrofula.73 Frank Barlow writes that by 1307, “the French royal court had become the regular resort of men and women suffering from the royal disease” and explains that on his deathbed, the king passed information about the ritual on to his heir.74 Even Joseph Strayer, generally favorable towards Philip, writes that the king “sought moral and legal justification for all his acts, but he had a tendency to believe that in any dispute right must be on his side and that opposition was therefore inexcusable.”75 Strayer adds that royal officials took advantage of the king’s piety and overweening royal pride to advance their own agendas; in other words, the king’s character traits may have made him an easy mark for an unscrupulous accuser attempting to carry out his or her own agenda.76 In short, Philip IV is widely seen among historians as a “man of grandiose, unrealistic, and conflicting ambitions, of deep-seated insecurities and suspicions, of compulsive scrupulosity....”77
In many ways, the case of the Templars offers a parallel example to that of the princesses.
True, the Templars’ arrest was opportunistic and, “like the expulsion of the Jews and Lombards, further strengthened the alliance between thea different conclusion. See also Brown, “The Case of Philip the Fair,” and Favier, “Les legistes et le gouvernement de Philippe le Bel.”
72 See also Gaposchkin, The Making of Saint Louis (IX) of France: and, more specifically on the issue, also by Gaposchkin, “Boniface VIII, Philip the Fair, and the Sanctity of Louis IX.” See also Hallam, “Philip the Fair and the Cult of Saint Louis.”
73 Brown, “The Prince is Father of the King,” 288-89, and “The King’s Evil,” 23-24. See also Brown, “Taxation and Morality;” and Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, 417-19. The classic work on the royal touch is Marc Bloch, Les rois thaumaturges.
74 Barlow, “The King’s Evil,” 23.
75 Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, 34.
76 Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, 34.
77 Brown, “The Prince is Father of the King,” 334. Popular historians of the nineteenth century seem particularly disposed to view the king as oppressive and censorious. See Martin, Histoire de France, 4: 381, who describes Philip’s handsome but cold face, noting that his youthful taciturnity hid what was to come. Martin’s descriptions become progressively more unflattering. Boutaric offers a generally positive assessment of the king’s character in La France sous Philippe le Bel, 408-26. Recent historians are less judgemental, but generally agree that the king was self-righteous. Even Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, favorably disposed towards the king, writes that while the king respected the law, “he could be easily satisfied that due process had been observed” (34).
King and the bourgeoisie” by ridding the kingdom of a dangerously independent force and clearing the way for a new group of financiers who were dependent upon royal patronage.[78] This was not lost on contemporaries.[79] But if the king was tempted to act by financial concerns, his primary motivation seems to have been his desire to position himself as defender against heresy.
In an analysis of documents related to the Templar trials, Malcolm Barber explains that Philip proclaimed his actions necessary to preserve the great chain of being linking his earthly kingdom to that of God in heaven. Philip meticulously presented his “essentially arbitrary seizure of the lands and persons of the Templars,” writes Barber, in such a way as “to convey to the world that the alleged heresies and depravities of the Templars were blows intended to destroy the proper ordering of society based on faith and reason.”[80] [81] In a speech made before the Pope, royal minister Guillaume Plaisans describes the actions of Philip and the Three Estates against the Templars as those of “zealots of the Catholic faith, defenders of the Church, the wall of Jerusalem, and the purgers of heretical depravity....”81 Still more forcefully, Julien Thery has recently argued thatthe crimes attributed to the Templars constituted a heresy of state: these crimes served to construct a royal almightiness, just as heresy in general, defined as “divine lese-majeste,” had served the construction of papal theocracy from the end of the twelfth century onward. The repression of the Templars' heresy was an important moment for the rise of French royal absolutism, which initially took the form of a royal theocracy.
The growing discontent among the barons of the kingdom during the last years of Philip IV's life can be regarded as a leveling of the distinctions that characterized the king's feudal society. In addition, the self-righteous king seems to have been tormented by moral doubt, experiencing a personal leveling of the distinction between good and evil. A war with Flanders was narrowly avoided in July 1313, but Philip began to fear almost immediately that war would be necessary, which raised the specter of having to ask yet again for taxes.[82] This seems to have caused Philip considerable moral anguish. In 1313, he had returned a tax levied for a war against Flanders when a truce was reached; however, as we have seen, when a similar situation occurred just one year later, he did not return the money, leading to the formation of leagues against him.
E. A.R. Brown writes that “twisting the truth to his own purposes, he declared that a state of war still existed; only later, when he knew that he was dying, did he abolish the tax, although he did not bring himself, even then, to command restitution.”[83] The depth of his guilt over the taxes he had imposed is manifested in a chronicle account of his deathbed confession where he expresses regret for having oppressed his people unjustly through “taxes and extortion.”[84]But who would have taken advantage of the king’s self-righteousness and doubt by suggesting that the royal daughters-in-law were betraying their spouses and therefore the king himself? And why? Jules Michelet proposes that the story was invented by a monk who, angered by King Philip’s treatment of the pope, “found a means to tarnish the entire house of Philip the Fair.”[85] The king, we have seen, was extremely unpopular with his grands seigneurs. Throwing the royal succession into question would have been a satisfying way for any number of them to avenge themselves. Or the accusation might have come from enemies of the Aunay brothers. The king’s daughter, Isabella, married to Edward II of England, has also been suggested as a possible informant. She was visiting France on behalf of her husband at the time of the tragedy and spent time with her father in Paris on Saturday, 6 April, just three days before the arrests of the princesses.[86]
Or, as I noted above and have suggested in an earlier article, Marigny seems a likely candidate for role of accuser, given his intimacy with the king.[87] But what would have been his motive? In her recent monograph, Gaelle Audeon corroborates the suggestion and offers a plausible explanation. Marigny, deeply invested in seeing the war in Flanders through to its finish, was horrified by the prospect of a new Crusade, which had been proposed in 1313 by the king and his family, because it would divert the scarce resources that Marigny required.
Audeon shows that Marigny’s secret opposition to the Crusade is revealed in a document stored in the Vatican library, edited in 1900 by Jakob Schwalm, analysed and cited by Olivier Canteaut. She incorporates this document into an elegant theory.Although Marigny succeeded in convincing Philip IV to hold off on the Crusade, he feared that as soon as the king died his heir Louis and Louis’s wife Marguerite would renew the call for a Crusade. Marguerite, after all, was the grand-daughter of Louis IX, ultimate Crusader. Her seconding the call for a Crusade when king’s sons took up the Cross was sure to be taken seriously given this family connection. But why bring down the other princesses too, Audeon wonders? The reason, she suggests, is that Marigny knew that Jeanne and Blanche would have fiercely defended Marguerite; their reputations therefore needed to be hopelessly blackened as well.
Just a month before the incident of the daughters-in-law, in a move controversial everywhere but within the Capetian kingdom, Philip IV had had Templar leaders publicly burned at the stake, culmination of a long attempt to crush the order. The chronicle versions of the princesses and their knights mirror the Templars, as challenges to the king’s moral authority requiring ruthless repression; what Thery writes about the Templars is also true of the princesses, that “nothing, apart from their arrest and forced confessions, justifies belief in their guilt. No proof corroborating confessions has ever been discovered.”[88]