Louis VI, then, consolidated his power within his ancestral homeland and made its
administration more amenable to the royal will, thus laying the foundation upon which
his successors would build the French monarchy as a dominant power in western
European medieval history.
James W.Alexander
[See also: GARLANDE; SUGER]
Suger. Vie de Louis VI le Gros, ed. Henri Waquet. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1964.
——. The Deeds of Louis the Fat, trans. Richard Cusimano and John Moorhead. Washington, D.C.:
Catholic University of America Press, 1992.
Bur, Michel. Suger, abbé de Saint-Denis, régent de France. Paris: Perrin, 1991.
de Bayac, Jacques Delperrié. Louis VI: la naissance de la France. Paris: Lattès, 1983.
Dunbabin, Jean. France in the Making, 843–1180. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Fawtier, Robert. The Capetian Kings of France: Monarchy and Nation (987–1328), trans. Lionel
Butler and R.J.Adam. London: Macmillan, 1960.
Hallam, Elizabeth. Capetian France, 987–1328. London: Longman, 1980.
LOUIS VII
(1120–1180). King of France. Crowned in 1137, Louis, the son of Louis VI, continued
his father’s expansion of royal power, extending his authority beyond the Île-de-France.
He cleverly utilized marriage alliances and relations with the French church and with the
papacy as instruments of royal policy, notably during the second half of his reign.
Louis’s reign to ca. 1152 was not auspicious, characterized by blundering relations
with important barons and with the church, a failed marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, and
an inept crusade. Pacaut, the most perceptive historian of his reign, argues that its
unhappy first fifteen years were due primarily to the king’s youth and lack of training for
the kingship, to which he became heir only upon the death of his older brother. Certainly,
these years were marked by impetuosity and bad judgment; but Louis grew to his
responsibilities and passed the monarchy to his son, Philip II Augustus, with enhanced
prestige and power.
That the monarchy survived the first half of the reign indicates some political ability
on the part of the king and his advisers; his domain was surrounded by powerful and
dangerous neighbors, the most threatening of which was Normandy (by 1154 united with
Anjou), the kingdom of England, and the duchy of Aquitaine. Henry II of England, his
continental possessions vastly augmented by his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine,
Louis’s first wife, posed a threat, but he was distracted by internal problems and perhaps
uninterested in pushing hostilities with Louis, his feudal overlord, to the point of serious
conflict.
Pacaut explained that Louis depended upon cooperation with the church, with the
nobility, and with the territorial and administrative base of the Île-de-France to maintain,
and eventually to enhance, the royal authority. There were faltering beginnings toward
converting the rights of the monarch as feudal overlord to the rights of the king as
sovereign, from the powers of the king as a private source of authority to the king as a
public authority figure. At the close of his reign, the court was dominated by the relatives
The Encyclopedia 1071