Louis VI

Royal authority in the Île-de-France was contested ground when Louis VI assumed power, and his reign was devoted largely to mastering it. The son of Philip I and Bertha of Holland, he had shouldered military responsibility during his father's last years and became king in 1108. Heavily built — contemporaries called him "the Fat" in his later years — he was nonetheless an energetic and almost constantly active campaigner.

Louis's most lasting work lay in the systematic reduction of the robber barons whose castles dominated the roads around Paris and Orléans. In repeated sieges he broke the power of lords such as Hugh of Le Puiset and Thomas of Marle, making the royal domain safe for travel, commerce, and church property. The effort won him the durable support of the clergy, embodied in his close collaborator Suger, abbot of Saint-Denis, whose biography of the king remains the principal source for the reign.

Against external rivals the record was more mixed. Louis fought a long intermittent war with Henry I of England over Normandy and the Vexin, suffering a notable defeat at Brémule in 1119. In 1124, however, when the Emperor Henry V threatened to invade France, Louis raised the banner of Saint-Denis, the oriflamme, and summoned the great vassals of the realm; the assembled host was large enough that the invasion was abandoned, a striking demonstration of the king's standing as feudal overlord.

His marriage to Adelaide of Maurienne, of the house of Savoy, produced numerous children, including his successor. The reign closed with a diplomatic coup: when Duke William X of Aquitaine died in 1137 leaving his daughter Eleanor as heiress, Louis arranged her immediate marriage to his son, promising to attach the vast duchy of Aquitaine to the crown. The king died weeks later, in August 1137. Though the Aquitanian union would ultimately fail, Louis VI left the monarchy stronger, more solvent, and more respected than he had found it.