Louis VII

Originally destined for the church, Louis VII became heir to France only when his elder brother Philip died in a riding accident in 1131. The second son of Louis VI and Adelaide of Maurienne, he was crowned co-king that year and succeeded his father in 1137, weeks after marrying Eleanor, heiress of the duchy of Aquitaine. The match briefly joined the largest principality of southern France to the crown.

Louis took the cross after the fall of Edessa and led the Second Crusade to the East in 1147, accompanied by Eleanor. The expedition, undertaken jointly with the German king Conrad III, ended in failure, including an unsuccessful siege of Damascus in 1148. The crusade also strained the royal marriage, and in 1152 a church council annulled the union on grounds of consanguinity. The consequences were momentous: within months Eleanor married Henry Plantagenet, Count of Anjou and Duke of Normandy, who became King Henry II of England in 1154. Aquitaine thus passed to the Plantagenet assemblage of territories, leaving the English king master of more French land than his nominal Capetian overlord.

For the rest of the reign Louis maneuvered against this Angevin preponderance, generally avoiding open war while exploiting divisions among his rivals. He sheltered Archbishop Thomas Becket during his exile from England and supported Pope Alexander III against the emperor Frederick Barbarossa. He later encouraged the rebellion of Henry II's sons in 1173, though the rising failed. His daughters by Eleanor, Marie and Alix, married the counts of Champagne and Blois, while another daughter, Margaret, wed Henry the Young King, binding Capetian and Plantagenet lines even amid their rivalry.

The succession long remained uncertain. Louis's second wife, Constance of Castile, died in 1160 leaving only daughters; his third, Adela of Champagne, finally bore a son, Philip, in 1165. Louis had the boy crowned in 1179 and died the following year. Despite territorial losses, he transmitted intact royal prestige and an unbroken succession to Philip II Augustus, who would reverse the balance against the Plantagenets.