House of Lilies: The Dynasty that Made Medieval France
Justine Firnhaber-Baker
Penguin, £30, 448 pages
On 12 August 1239, Louis IX of France and h is entourage intercepted some monks on the busy road between Sens and Troyes and demanded to see their cargo. The brothers handed the king a wooden box. Inside, Louis found another one made of silver, and inside that one made of gold. Nestled within this last container lay a far greater treasure still: the Crown of Thorns said to have been worn by Jesus at the Crucifixion.
Seeing the relic, whose delivery from Constantinople was long awaited, Louis and his companions gazed with flowing tears. It was “as if they were seeing God himself crowned with these very thorns”, wrote eyewitness Gauthier Cornut, the Archbishop of Sens.
The combination of the Crown’s acquisition and its lavish display in Paris’s Saint-Chappelle on the one hand, and Louis’s severe personal asceticism on the other, means that the origin of the French monarch’s traditional style of Rex Christianissimus – Most Christian King – is commonly attributed to his reign, despite well-attested earlier use. Louis’s canonisation by Boniface VIII in 1297 gifted France’s Capetian dynasty a royal saint rivalling England’s Edward the Confessor.
The Capetians – the “House of Lilies” to which the book’s title refers – are a slippery historical concept. In one sense, as Firnhaber-Baker points out, they are, paradoxically, a creation of the French Revolution. When Louis XVI went to the guillotine on 21 January 1793, he died as “Citizen Louis Capet” – because a demotic surname had to be hastily improvised for him.
Officials went back to the tap-root of his genealogy: Hugh Capet (c. 940-996), who was elected king of the much smaller territory then known as West Francia in 987. Capet – “short cloak” – was not a family designation but rather Hugh’s nickname.
Close blood ties between successors meant that, down to 1793, neither French kings nor their critics saw the pre-revolutionary line as a succession of distinct “houses”. Even so, “Capetian” is now used to designate specifically the 11 generations of unbroken transfer of the crown between fathers and sons (and latterly brothers) lasting from Hugh’s death until that of Charles IV in 1398.
The biological lottery’s gift to the Capetians of an unbroken male succession gave their lands a level of dynastic stability unrivalled in medieval Europe. It also allowed Hugh’s direct successors to “shape” medieval France not just politically and culturally, but quite literally. By 1398, the kingdom’s borders bore a strong resemblance to the country we know today.
Religion was central to Capetian political decision making, self-conception and public communication. The dynasty’s heraldic emblem, the tripartite fleur-de-lys, evokes both the Holy Trinity and the patronage of Mary, Queen of Heaven.
When Louis VI (1081-1137) began striking it on the reverse of coins (with himself on the obverse), he mingled the symbolic grammar of celestial and earthly monarchy and “encapsulated the Capetians’ claims about their right to rule France not only by right of blood but also through divine favour”.
Capetian religiosity was, however, often far from serene. The “flip-side” of the coin of their genuinely deep and tender piety was the visiting of deadly religious violence on those whom they regarded as Christ’s enemies. The lead role successive Capetians (including St Louis himself) took in crusading expeditions to the Middle East won admiration across Europe but, as they were usually poorly planned, also occasioned disastrous losses of life and money.
Amid the fervour of “holy war”, Muslim and Christian armies alike inevitably ran amok in ways contrary to the chivalric codes governing conf ict between Christian neighbours in the Latin West. More troubling, even to some contemporary eyes, however, was the Capetians’ consistent domestic severity towards those departing from Christian or thodoxy and (periodically) towards Jews.
The Capetians were pioneers in religious cruelty. At Orleans in 1022, Robert II (9721031) oversaw the f rst ever burning of Christian heretics in Europe. Such enthusiasm for the extirpation of perceived deviancy was to surface repeatedly among his descendants.
The most notorious case, which shocked medieval Europe, was Philip II’s (11651223) sacking of the town of Béziers in 1209, during the Albigensian Crusade against the Languedoc Cathars. Philip’s troops “brought to the venture the same indiscriminate violence that had marked some of the worst excesses of the Holy Land crusades”. Some sources blame the accompanying papal legate, who was alleged to have cried out: “Kill them all! The Lord knows his own.”
<em>House of Lilies</em> offers an absorbing imaginative journey through both the splendour and the gore of medieval France – though some may finish it relieved not to have been there in person.
<em>The Revd Alexander Faludy is an Anglican clergyman and freelance journalist.</em>
