In 1282 bloodthirsty Sicilians cast off the hated French yoke
Posted in Historical articles, History, Politics, Royalty, War on Thursday, 28 February 2013
This edited article about France originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 165 published on 13 March 1965.
The Crusading spirit was blossoming out in France again. The reigning king, Louis the Seventh – called Louis the Young because his reign began when he was 18 – was, like his father, a zealous Christian and he had not long been crowned before he had taken the Cross and was on the march to Jerusalem.
With King Louis went his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, a romantic, capricious and beautiful Queen who bestrides the medieval European scene like a story-book princess.
Eleanor was a determined woman, very fond of her own way. Her way, however, was not the way of her pious husband. Much more to her liking was fiery-tempered Henry Plantagenet, Count of Anjou. Divorce and its complications counted little to Eleanor; she simply left her King and married her Count.
The result of this marriage was that when her new husband became King Henry the Second of England, Eleanor achieved the remarkable feat of having been separately Queen of France and England.
Her second marriage and Henry’s inheritance of the English throne boded ill for France. For Eleanor was a powerful woman in her own right, lord of a large part of France that included the duchy of Aquitaine. To this territory Henry was able to add his own French possessions, Maine, Anjou and Normandy, as well as England.
One day in 1154, therefore, King Louis woke up in his bed with the sombre realization that the King of England and his Queen, Louis’s own late wife, owned a good deal more of France than he did.
This was the precarious state of France which Louis, when he died in September 1180, bequeathed to his 15-year-old son, Philip the Second.
A boy made of lesser stuff might have been excused for surrendering what little he had in the face of all the power gathered around him. But not so Philip. His first trump was that his potential enemies, the Plantagenets, were hopelessly divided among themselves; the sons hated their father and spent their youth so busily fighting him that Philip had no cause for fear.
And his second trump was that the oldest of the Plantagenet sons, Richard, was his best friend.
Faced with his family’s hostility, King Henry of England had to make peace with young King Philip. Several times they met under a French elm tree and vowed their friendship; holy crusades, they agreed, were much more important than European strife.
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