Philip IV the Fair

A grandson of Saint Louis, Philip IV pressed the claims of the French crown against popes, prelates and military orders with a persistence that reshaped the monarchy. He was the second son of Philip III and Isabella of Aragon, daughter of James I of Aragon, and became heir on the death of his elder brother Louis in 1276. In 1284 he married Joan I, queen of Navarre and countess of Champagne in her own right, a match that attached the Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre and the wealthy county of Champagne to the French crown for as long as their line endured. He succeeded his father in 1285.

His quarrel with Pope Boniface VIII began over royal taxation of the clergy, answered by the bull Clericis laicos in 1296, and escalated to questions of sovereignty itself, met by Unam Sanctam in 1302. That year Philip summoned representatives of clergy, nobility and towns to Paris — commonly counted the first Estates General — to support his cause. In 1303 his minister Guillaume de Nogaret confronted and briefly seized the pope at Anagni; Boniface died weeks later. Under Clement V, elected in 1305, the papacy settled at Avignon in 1309, within the French sphere of influence.

War with Flanders brought the humiliating defeat of the French cavalry by Flemish townsmen at Courtrai in 1302, partly redeemed at Mons-en-Pévèle in 1304. Chronic financial pressure drove Philip to manipulate the coinage, expel the Jews from France in 1306, and move against the Knights Templar, who were arrested throughout France in October 1307 on charges of heresy. The order was suppressed at the Council of Vienne in 1312, and its last grand master, Jacques de Molay, was burned at Paris in March 1314.

Three of Philip's sons reigned in turn as Louis X, Philip V and Charles IV; with the death of the last in 1328 the direct Capetian line ended. His daughter Isabella married Edward II of England, a Plantagenet union through which her son Edward III later claimed the French throne. In 1314 the Tour de Nesle scandal disgraced the wives of two of his sons. Philip died at Fontainebleau in November of that year.