to codify, as its preface puts it, “judicial institutions in behalf of safeguarding peace
and the rights of justice between clergy and laity, between townsmen and peasants,
among the needy and the poor.”^7 The preface might have added that the laws also
regulated relations between local Christians, Muslims, and Jews.
The kingdom of France was smaller and more fragile than Spain; it was lucky
that it did not confront an Islamic frontier or competing royal neighbors (though a
glance at Map 6.4 shows that it was surrounded by plenty of independent counts and
dukes). When Philip II (r.1180–1223) came to the throne at the age of fifteen, his
kingdom consisted largely of the Ile-de-France, a dwarf surrounded by giants. Philip
seemed an easy target for the ambitions of English king Henry II and the counts of
Flanders and Champagne. Philip, however, played them off against one another.
Through inheritance he gained a fair portion of the county of Flanders in 1191. Soon
his military skills came to the fore as he wrenched Normandy from the king of
England in 1204. This was the major conquest of his career, and in its wake he soon
forced the lords of Maine, Anjou, and Poitou, once vassals of the king of England, to
submit to him. A contemporary chronicler dubbed him Philip Augustus, recalling the
expansionist first Roman emperor.
Indeed Philip did more than expand; he integrated his Norman conquest into his
kingdom. Norman nobles promised him homage and fealty, while Philip’s royal
officers went about their business in Normandy—taxing, hearing cases, careful not to
tread on local customs, but equally careful to enhance the flow of income into the
French king’s treasury. Gradually the Normans were brought into a new “French”
orbit just beginning to take shape, constructed partly out of the common language of
French and partly out of a new notion of the king as ruler of all the people in his
territory.
Although there was never a French “common law” to supersede local ones, the
French king, like the Spanish and English, succeeded in extending royal power
through governmental bureaucracy. After 1194, Philip had all his decrees written
down, establishing permanent repositories in which to keep them. Like the Angevin
kings of England, Philip relied on members of the lesser nobility—knights and clerics,
most of them educated in the city schools—to do the work of government. They
served as officers of his court; as prévôts, officials who oversaw the king’s estates
and collected his taxes; and as baillis (or, in some places, seneschals) who not only
supervised the prévôts but also functioned as judges, presiding over courts that met
monthly, making the king’s power felt locally as never before.
