The fame of the university and its teachers attracted more and more students from afar.
The left bank proliferated with privately endowed residential colleges and convents for
students and with the houses of the new mendicant orders, maintained for those members
who studied and taught in Paris. The preeminence of the city was sealed on the one hand
by the university, on the other by Louis IX himself. The process begun by Louis VI’s
decision to settle in Paris was completed in the age of Louis IX; the role of Paris as the
capital, as the seat of national government, dominated by Parisian bureaucracy, was
completed in the 13th century.
In the 14th century, Paris grew to a population, estimated from the surviving fiscal
registers, of over 80,000, a quarter of whom may have been students. Royal
administration grew apace in both size and organization and provided documents
concerning households, taxpayers, and tithes. By 1352, nearly 80 percent of the city’s
taxpayers and taxable wealth was on the right bank, which remains today the financial
center of the city. Great lords, both lay and ecclesiastical, acquired houses in Paris as
their business and capital increased. Corporate bodies like towns and monasteries often
had to maintain representatives there for extended periods. Later examples of some of
these structures remain: the Hôtel de Sens (1475–1519) and the Hotel de Cluny (1485–
98), for example. The houses of noble and bourgeois families engaged in royal and city
bureaucracy proliferated, although traces of only a few now remain: the portal of the
Hotel de Clisson, built by the king’s future constable after 1371, or the Tower of John the
Fearless (ca. 1400), all that remains of the residence of the dukes of Burgundy.
The bourgeoisie of Paris began to produce families of great wealth, among them the
Arroude, Barbette, Bourdon, Coquatrix, Marcel, de Pacy, Pizdoue, and Sarrazin. Such
families grew wealthy practicing a trade, but they also were speculators who stockpiled
goods in anticipation of shortages. In addition, some of them became moneychangers,
farmed royal offices or municipal taxes, or became purveyors to the growing royal
household. Prominent Parisians sometimes gained important positions in the royal
government, especially in areas of finance. Others studied law and served in the
Parlement. By the 14th century, some of those who had won royal favor were receiving
patents of nobility.
Despite the growth of sedentary organs of the royal government, the kings themselves
maintained an itinerant style of life until the mid-14th century. When not on crusades or
other military campaigns, they generally resided at favored monasteries or royal manors,
most of them in the region around Paris and close to forests with good hunting. John II
the Good finally began to alter this pattern, spending more time in the royal palace on the
Cité than had his predecessors. Charles V also spent much time in Paris but preferred to
reside on the right bank, either in the Louvre or his new Hotel de Saint-Pol. The latter
was also the favored residence of Charles VI. In the 15th century, by contrast, the kings
were often absent from Paris. Charles VII did not set foot there from the Burgundian
occupation of 1418 until the expulsion of the English conquerors in 1436. Even
thereafter, he preferred the Loire Valley as a residence, and so did his son, Louis XI (d.
1483), who had been born in that region and harbored a dislike for the Parisians.
Despite considerable loss of population from the Black Death of 1348–49, the right
bank had acquired such a large population outside the walls of Philip Augustus—some
fifty-one streets by 1300—that Étienne Marcel, prévôt des marchands (1354–58), in 1356
began construction of a new wall, which was continued by Charles V. With the 430 acres
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