Philip I

Few medieval French kings reigned as long as Philip I, who held the crown for forty-eight years. The son of Henry I and Anne of Kiev, he bore a Greek name introduced through his mother's Rurikid ancestry. He became king in 1060 at the age of eight, with his uncle by marriage, Count Baldwin V of Flanders, serving as guardian until the young king came of age.

Philip pursued a patient policy of enlarging the royal domain, the lands under the king's direct control. He acquired the Gâtinais in 1068, gained the French Vexin in 1077, and obtained the viscounty of Bourges in 1101. These additions, modest individually, strengthened the territorial base from which his successors would extend royal power. He also worked to limit the growing strength of his Norman neighbors, supporting Robert Curthose against his father William the Conqueror and, later, against William Rufus, in an early phase of the long contest between the Capetians and the rulers of Normandy and England.

The defining scandal of the reign began in 1092, when Philip repudiated his wife Bertha of Holland, mother of his heir Louis, and took Bertrade de Montfort, the wife of Count Fulk IV of Anjou. The church condemned the union, and Philip was excommunicated repeatedly, with the sentence renewed at the Council of Clermont in 1095, the same assembly at which Pope Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade. Partly for this reason the king took no part in the expedition, although his brother Hugh of Vermandois joined it. Philip was eventually reconciled with the church after promising to renounce Bertrade.

In his final years Philip increasingly left government to his son Louis, who was already active in subduing the unruly castellans of the Île-de-France. The king died in 1108 and, breaking with the custom of burial at Saint-Denis, was interred at the abbey of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire in accordance with his wishes. His son succeeded without challenge as Louis VI.