France
The Song of Roland, written about the time of the First Crusade ( 1099), stirred the patriotism of Frenchmen -- Franci -- by its portrayal of their heroism and piety and by its references to la douce France.
Yet at that time France as a political entity hardly existed. The King of France was master of less than a twentieth of the territory inhabited by Burgundians, Picards, Normans, Bretons, Gascons, Provengals, and a score of other major clans ("stems") that composed the slowly emerging nation of Franci. What the king ruled was the ιle de France, the region surrounding the episcopal cities of Paris and Orleans, consisting largely of the patrimonial royal domain. The rest of what France later became was divided into duchies, counties, and lordships of various kinds, many of which were, in theory, held in feudal tenure of the king, but all of which were, in fact, quite independent. Among the half-dozen dukes were those of Normandy, Aquitaine, Britanny, and Burgundy; among the score of counts were those of Flanders, Anjou, Toulouse, Blois,-461-
Manche, Barcelona; some of these_____ for example, the Duke of Normandy and the Count of Flanders
__ commanded considerably more power, wealth, and territory than the King of France.
More than a hundred years earlier, in 987, the last Carolingian king of the Western Franks, Louis V, had died and been succeeded by Hugh Capet. (The title of "emperor" had already passed to Eastern Frankish rulers.) The Capetian dynasty had been unable to do much more than maintain control over its vassals in the royal domain. In the 1100s it began to do better. Louis VI ( 1108-1137) and Louis VII ( 1137-1180) introduced more sophisticated governmental and legal institutions. They also increased their territory by judicious marriages, although the most judicious of these, Louis VII's marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, ended -- after fifteen years -- in divorce, and Eleanor took her rich dowry of Aquitaine and Guyenne with her to another "Frenchman," Henry Plantagenet, Duke of Normandy, Count of Anjou and Maine, soon to become King Henry II of England.
The first great king of France, and the founder of the French state and of French royal law, was Philip II ( 1180-1223), whom later generations called Philip Augustus. By marital alliances and by conquest, and especially by his victory at Bouvines in 1214 over King John of England, Emperor Otto IV, and Count Ferrand of Flanders, Philip created, in effect, a French empire. In addition to the royal domain, that is, Francia proper, which had grown to include (besides the ιle de France) Champagne, Blois, Burgundy, Nevers, and the fiefs of the northeast extending to the English Channel, Philip's jurisdiction also included all or part of the duchies and counties of Normandy, Aquitaine, Brittany, Anjou, and Toulouse, which had been won chiefly from King Richard ( 1189-1199) and King John ( 1199-1216) of England. It was Philip's achievement to establish an integrated political and legal structure encompassing both the territories that belonged to him as his royal patrimony and the territories that he acquired by military or political means. Philip II did for France what Henry II had done a generation earlier for England and what Roger II had done two generations earlier for southern Italy.
Philip's "empire," like the "empires" of King Henry II of England and King Roger II of Sicily, constituted a federal state. In each of the three there was a kingdom ( France, England, Sicily) together with diverse duchies and counties and lordships that technically were not part of the kingdom. In each of the three, the various constituent polities -- kingdom, duchies, counties, lordships -- retained a certain degree of autonomy. Each of the constituent polities had its own governor, whether the king himself, a hereditary vassal of the king, or an official appointed by him. Each had its own customary law. Yet the king also governed and enacted laws applicable to all the diverse polities within his
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realm, and the king's courts had jurisdiction over certain types of cases arising in any of them.
France, to be sure, was much less unified than either England or Sicily-much less, even, than the entire territory ruled by Henry II or the entire territory ruled by Roger II. This is to be explained by several interrelated factors. France was much bigger; it had perhaps four or five times the population of either England or southern Italy. It started the process of unification later. It lacked the strong tradition of kingship and the strong legal sense of the Anglo-Saxons, on the one hand, and the great administrative talent of' the Normans, on the other. Perhaps its kings also lacked the utter ruthlessness of the Norman rulers, their lust for violence. Finally, the form of feudal economic system that prevailed in France also favored political dismemberment -- though what was cause and what was effect is here, as elsewhere, difficult to say.
Nevertheless, starting in the last two decades of the twelfth century and the first two decades of the thirteenth, there took place in France a rapid development of governmental and legal institutions parallel to that which had previously taken place in England and in Sicily.