APANAGE
. From apaner, to endow with a means of subsistence, the word apanage, appanage, or
appannage is used for a province or jurisdiction, or later for an office or annuity, granted
(with the reservation that in the absence of direct heirs the land escheated to the crown) to
the younger children of royalty to compensate them for not receiving the throne and to
preserve peace and love in the family. Robert II (r. 996–1031), son of Hugh Capet,
stopped partitioning the realm, as the Frankish kings had done, and began crowning his
eldest son during his lifetime, a practice continued until the reign of Philip Augustus. He
gave Burgundy to his second son. Like many of their predecessors and successors, the
next monarchs provided for their younger sons by marrying them to rich heiresses so that
they did not have to diminish the royal domain by enfeoffing part of it to a relative.
Beginning with the sons of Blanche of Castile and Louis VIII (r. 1223–26), apanages
became normal in France. By installing their sons as rulers, monarchs could control
newly acquired outlying areas, as northern French nobles had long done. In 1237, Robert
got Artois; Alphonse (who married the heiress of the last count of Toulouse), received
Poitou and Auvergne; and the posthumous Charles, Anjou. The royal line of Bourbon
dates from 1272, when the heiress of the Bourbonnais, Beatrice of Navarre, married
Robert, sixth son of St. Louis, who had received the county of Clermont as an apanage.
Philip IV’s brother Charles, who received Valois, fathered the house that came to the
throne in the person of his son Philip VI in 1328.
A number of these early grants escheated to the crown when the cadet branches died
off: Poitou and Auvergne, for example, at the death of Alphonse in 1271. In 1316, the
law of succession was interpreted to exclude women not only from the throne but from
succession to apanages as well. The younger sons of John II (r. 1350–64), Philip and
John, received Burgundy and Berry, respectively, ruling them virtually as independent
fiefs. Thereafter, royal princes with apanages tended to become peers; by the accession of
Charles V in 1364, when the heir apparent began to receive the Dauphiné, which Philip
VI had purchased from the last dauphin, Humbert II, in 1349, younger sons regularly
received duchies.
Louis XI (r. 1461–83) brought these virtually independent territories to heel after his
father had expelled the English, their frequent allies, from Aquitaine in 1453. The later
dukes of Burgundy tried to transform their holdings, having acquired other adjacent
principalities on each side of the imperial border, into a resurrected Middle Kingdom that
was broken up only after the defeat of Charles the Bold in 1477. Provence, ruled by
successive houses of Anjou, only escheated when the last duke, King René, whom Louis
XI had forbidden to remarry, died childless in 1480. The crown seized the vast Bourbon
apanage after its duke rebelled in the 1520s. The holders of apanages, however rich and
powerful, never again threatened the unity of France.
The Angevin and Plantagenêt kings also established apanages in England. Whereas
John Lackland received only money and the overlordship of Ireland, Henry III’s brother
Richard got Cornwall and his younger son Edmund, Lancaster. After Edward I conquered
Wales and formally made his eldest son prince there in 1301, it became customary to give
younger sons York, Lancaster, Gloucester, or Bedford as ducal apanages, but they never
had aspirations to become independent as their counterparts did in France.
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