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Updated: May 2, 2025
The relations of France and England remained uneasy, despite the marriage of two English kings in succession to ladies of the Capetian house. The union of Edward I. and Margaret of France had not done much to help the settlement of the disputed points in the interpretation of the treaty of Paris of 1303, and the match between Edward II and his stepmother's niece had been equally ineffective.
To this, it is likely, was added the fact it may very possibly have been the deciding consideration that during the more than fourteen years of the marriage but two daughters had been born, and the Capetian house still lacked an heir. Whatever may have been the reason, a divorce was resolved upon not long after their return in 1149 from the second crusade.
She has always evinced a wondrous preventive apprehension of coming changes. Sir Henry Maine has shown in his Ancient Law that the idea of kingship created by the accession of the Capetian dynasty revolutionised the whole fabric of society, and that "when the feudal prince of a limited territory surrounding Paris began ... to call himself King of France, he became king in quite a new sense."
He was, besides, the first Capetian whom the king his father had not considered it necessary to have consecrated during his own life so as to impress upon him in good time the seal of religion.
Cæsar's adventurous crossing of the Rhine was a northern crossing. The Capetian monarchy was saved on its eastern front at Bouvines, in that same territory. The Austro-Spanish advance came down from it, to be checked at St. Quentin. Louis XIV.'s main struggle for power upon the marches of his kingdom concentrated here.
If the policy of ruling in Normandy was natural for the English king, that of keeping kingdom and duchy in different hands was an equally natural policy for the French king. It is hardly so early as this, however, that we can date the beginning of this which comes in the end to be a ruling motive of the Capetian house.
The hierarchy strove to centralise power at Rome that the Church might be purged of wolves in sheep's clothing: the Capetian monarchs to increase their might at Paris in order to subdue insolent and powerful vassals to law and obedience. In 1097 the Duke of Burgundy learned that Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury was about to pass through his territory with a rich escort on his way to Rome.
With rare exceptions, the personnel of the courts of justice was recruited from among the inhabitants of the province a precious advantage at a time when the predominance of provincial feeling caused those magistrates who were sent from the North of France into the South by the Capetian royalty to be regarded as foreigners and enemies.
The marriage was solemnized in 1152, and France saw her war with the feudal barons overshadowed by the fight for her very life with England, who had fastened this tremendous grasp upon her kingdom. The first truly great Capetian king came with this emergency. Philip Augustus, son of Louis VII., in the year 1180, when only fifteen years of age, seized the reins with the hand of a born ruler.
North Africa had long been in more direct communication with the old Empires of immemorial luxury, and was therefore farther advanced in the arts of living than the Spain and France of the Dark Ages; and this is why, in a country that to the average modern European seems as savage as Ashantee, one finds traces of a refinement of life and taste hardly to be matched by Carlovingian and early Capetian Europe.
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