Charles IV

With Charles IV the direct line of Hugh Capet came to its end. The third son of Philip IV and Joan I of Navarre, he ruled both France and Navarre, the latter as Charles I, from his accession in 1322 on the death of his brother Philip V. Like his brothers he inherited a kingdom with a sophisticated administration and an unresolved dynastic problem: the lack of a male heir.

His first marriage, to Blanche of Burgundy, daughter of Count Otto IV of Burgundy, had been destroyed by the Tour de Nesle adultery scandal of 1314; Blanche remained imprisoned, and the marriage was annulled in 1322. Charles then married Marie of Luxembourg, daughter of the emperor Henry VII, linking the Capetians to the imperial house of Luxembourg, but she died in 1324. His third wife was his cousin Jeanne d'Évreux, of a cadet Capetian branch. The marriages produced no son who survived.

The principal foreign conflict of the reign was the War of Saint-Sardos in 1324, a brief Anglo-French struggle arising from a disputed priory in Gascony. French forces overran most of the English-held duchy of Aquitaine. Charles's sister Isabella, queen of England as the wife of Edward II, came to Paris to negotiate; her stay became the platform from which she and her allies launched the invasion that deposed her husband in 1326-1327. The settlement left England's Plantagenet kings holding a reduced Gascony on burdensome terms.

Charles died at Vincennes in February 1328, leaving Queen Jeanne pregnant. When she bore a daughter, the assembled magnates passed over the claims of women and of Isabella's son Edward III of England, who claimed through his mother, and gave the crown to Philip of Valois, a first cousin of the late king. The accession of Philip VI transferred the monarchy to the house of Valois, and Edward III's rejected claim furnished the dynastic pretext for the Hundred Years' War. Charles IV thus closed three and a half centuries of unbroken father-to-son and brother-to-brother Capetian succession.