The Capetians: Medieval France’s Greatest Dynasty

Sometime around the year 1015 a monk at the cathedral of Sens in northern France wrote a chronicle of the Frankish people. He was a little sketchy on the early centuries, though he knew that Charlemagne’s dynasty – the Carolingians – had taken the throne from their Merovingian predecessors in the eighth century, and he also knew that Charlemagne’s empire had been riven by invasion and civil wars that had divided it into three kingdoms around 840. But when he got closer to his own day he became more voluble, if rather less reliable. Sens lay in the kingdom of what was then called West Francia, forerunner of medieval and modern France, and it had been given to Charlemagne’s youngest grandson, Charles the Bald, by the Treaty of Verdun in 843 after a war with his brothers. According to the Sens chronicle, Charles’ descendants were the rightful rulers of West Francia. Nevertheless, it continued, in 987 a usurper named Hugh had seized the realm from its legitimate Carolingian king through treachery. By the time the chronicler was writing Hugh’s son Robert had succeeded him and it was clear that this new dynasty was to rule from now on, to the Carolingians’ exclusion. Looking back at Hugh’s coronation, the chronicler dolefully concluded: ‘Here ended the realm of Charlemagne.’

The Sens chronicler was not wrong about the end of Carolingian rule over West Francia – the new dynasty, known as the Capetians, would rule France for the next three centuries – but he was completely misleading about the circumstances that had led to the Capetians’ accession. Perhaps he had bad information or was biased towards the Carolingians or against the see of Reims, whose archbishop had supported Hugh. Other sources, especially a chronicle written nearer the time by a monk named Richer, tell a less sinister story. In these accounts, following the accidental death of the last Carolingian king, Hugh was chosen by the realm’s nobles because of his personal qualities and his princely background. But unfortunately for Hugh’s reputation and his descendants’ peace of mind, Richer’s chronicle was lost almost immediately after its composition and the Sens version caught on. Incorporated into chronicle after chronicle, it became the canonical version of the events of 987 and gave rise to ominous prophecies predicting the new dynasty’s demise.

In time, the descendants of this supposed usurper became the longest reigning and most renowned dynasty in medieval Christendom. Ruling France for more than 300 years in an unbroken line of succession, the Capetians turned West Francia into the most powerful and prestigious kingdom in Latin Europe and made themselves into figures of legend. They became known as the ‘Most Christian Kings’ for their prosecution of the Crusade, their persecution of religious minorities and their patronage of great religious houses and figures, including Saint Thomas Becket. They wrenched Normandy, Anjou and Poitou from English hands and conquered the Languedoc. They transformed Paris from a muddy backwater into a splendid metropole, and founded some of the city’s most beloved monuments, including the Louvre and the Sainte-Chapelle. It was the Capetians who first adopted the fleur-de-lys, the three-petalled lily that became emblematic of France. And yet they never escaped the story that they owed their crown to Hugh’s perfidy. The myth of usurpation dogged the dynasty down to its dying days.

Ottonian issues

Because of Hugh’s descendants’ long reign and great accomplishments, his coronation in 987 now seems like a watershed moment. The dynasty’s very name – although a modern invention – derives from his medieval nickname, ‘Capet’ (‘short-cloak’). But in 987 Hugh’s accession would not have seemed particularly revolutionary; he was not even the first of his family to sit on the West Frankish throne. He came from a princely lineage – now known as the Robertians after their founder Robert the Strong (d.866) – that had been trading the West Frankish crown back and forth with the Carolingians for over a century. So although later medieval writers often assumed that Hugh had base origins – Dante even claimed that he had been a Parisian butcher before becoming king – that was very much not the case.

Relations between the Robertians and their Carolingian counterparts had not always been smooth, but they co-operated as much as they competed – great families usually did in these centuries of shifting alliances. Hugh’s father, Hugh the Great, had supported the succession of the Carolingian King Louis IV in 936, engineering his return from exile in the court of King Æthelstan of Wessex, and while Hugh (senior) and Louis later went to war, they were also brothers-in-law. Each had married a sister of the German emperor Otto I. Their sons, Hugh (Capet) and Lothar, were therefore cousins, and when Hugh the Great and Louis IV died with the boys still young, the sisters raised them and ruled their lands on their behalf. When Lothar came of age and inherited his kingdom in 954, he made his cousin Hugh his right-hand man. It was not so much conflict over West Francia as trouble with the German empire that eventually drove a wedge between them and set the stage for the younger Hugh’s accession.

The problems started because Lothar, a Carolingian, wanted to revive his family’s claim to land that lay between West Francia and its East Frankish imperial counterpart. The 843 Treaty of Verdun that had given West Francia to Charles the Bald (Charlemagne’s youngest grandson) had also given East Francia (roughly analogous to Germany) to Charles’ half-brother Louis the German and created a ‘Middle Kingdom’, later called Lotharingia, between the two. This Middle Kingdom was awarded to a third brother (also named Lothar), but it soon disappeared and was eventually absorbed into East Francia. Since 918, East Francia had been ruled by the Ottonian dynasty, who had succeeded the East Frankish line of Carolingians and whom the pope had made emperors in 962. As emperors, the Ottonians tended to treat West Francia as a vassal state. Lothar, named after that Lothar to whom the Middle Kingdom had been given in 843, thus saw the restoration of this vanished realm not only as a matter of family honour but also as a counterweight against Ottonian overreach in West Francia.

And so Lothar attacked the Ottonians in 978 with Hugh at his side. Together they invaded Charlemagne’s old palace at Aachen and forced Emperor Otto II and his pregnant wife to flee. Otto II soon struck back, but when he died a few years later, leaving a three-year-old son (also named Otto), Lothar took advantage by seizing Verdun on the far western edge of the Ottonians’ lands. Lothar might have just been testing the strength of young Otto III’s mother, a Byzantine princess named Theophano who was ruling on his behalf, but it turned out to be a mistake that would cost Lothar and his lineage dearly. Hugh was already drifting out of Lothar’s orbit and he took umbrage at the Verdun attack because his sister had lands in the city and her son (his nephew) was captured by Lothar’s forces. Even worse – at least for Lothar and his line – the incident also alienated two powerful West Frankish churchmen who supported the Ottonians and who began to wonder if Hugh might make a less troublesome king than Lothar was proving to be.

The archbishop and the monk

The Archbishop of Reims, Adalbero, had been serving as Lothar’s chancellor, but he owed his position in life to Ottonian favour, as did his friend and ally, a monk named Gerbert. A political schemer as well as a polymathic scholar, Gerbert had transcended his peasant origins through education and princely patronage. Later in life he would become Pope Sylvester II thanks largely to his Ottonian connections. Like Adalbero, Gerbert probably genuinely believed in the Ottonians’ rights and wanted to protect little Otto III, as well as to please Otto’s mother Theophano in the hope of additional favours. Hugh impressed the clerics not only as potentially more amenable to Ottonian interests than Lothar, but as a better soldier and statesman, too. As Gerbert wrote in 985, while Lothar was only ‘king in name’, Hugh was king ‘in act and in fact’.

Perhaps Gerbert was just saying what everyone was already thinking, or perhaps he and Adalbero had started to hatch a plan to replace Lothar with Hugh. But if that was the direction of travel, it was interrupted in 986 by Lothar’s unexpected death. He left a 19-year-old son, Louis V, who succeeded him without any apparent difficulty. Louis V might have mended fences with the Ottonians but, infuriatingly, he turned out to be an even more aggressive king than his father, if a far less competent one. In his short reign, Louis attacked Adalbero’s see at Reims and even imprisoned his own mother, the dowager-queen Emma, for her Ottonian sympathies. (Emma was rumoured to have had an affair with Adalbero’s nephew, the bishop of Laon, a claim that Louis seems to have believed.) But as luck would have it, Louis’ youthful vigour led to a fatal hunting accident in May 987. Adalbero was free to make his move.

Hugh’s selection

Just before his death, Louis V had summoned an assembly of nobles and prelates to the city of Compiègne to judge Adalbero for crimes against the realm, not least of them aiding and abetting Emma’s alleged affair. These charges died with Louis, but the assembly gave Adalbero a golden opportunity to shape the course of Frankish history. The late Louis V, who was recently divorced despite hardly having reached his twenties, had left no children behind so the assembly was now reconvened in the nearby city of Senlis to choose his successor. That a kingdom’s great men would meet to choose a king if there was no obvious successor – and sometimes even if there was one – was not unusual, though it might at first appear a jarringly ‘democratic’ procedure, especially since the Latin word for this process is electio. We can translate that word as ‘election’ but it also means ‘selection’, which is closer to what actually happened.

There were only two candidates, Hugh and Charles of Lorraine. The Sens chronicle imagined that this Charles was Louis’ brother and that he had already begun to reign as king, but in fact Charles was Louis’ uncle (Lothar’s brother) and uncrowned. He was, however, a Carolingian even if not in the direct line of descent. At the assembly, Adalbero gave a speech on Hugh’s behalf. According to the chronicler Richer, Adalbero waxed lyrical about Hugh’s splendid soldiering, his abundant wealth and his nobility of character and birth. These qualities ought to outweigh Charles’ genealogy, for ‘a kingdom’, he said, ‘cannot be acquired by hereditary right’. This was not really true, as Adalbero knew very well, but he also argued that Charles had forfeited the honour of his house. He had not only betrayed his lord, as Adalbero observed, but he betrayed his noble blood by marrying a woman so far beneath him that her relatives were not worthy to help Charles onto his horse. The assembly was convinced. Unanimously – at least according to Richer – they chose Hugh as king.

Adalbero then set the seal on Hugh’s kingship with rituals full of symbolism and history. First, he crowned him in the city of Noyon, where Charlemagne himself had been crowned king of the Franks in 768. Hugh’s coronation in that same city – a place whose Latin name means ‘new’ – imbued the ceremony with both a connection to the Carolingian past and a sense that great things lay ahead. They then continued southeast to Adalbero’s see at Reims, where he anointed Hugh with a very special holy chrism. Supposedly, this chrism had been brought down from heaven by a dove for the anointing of the Merovingian Clovis, first Christian king of the Franks, nearly 500 years before. This story had been essentially invented by an imaginative monk in the late ninth century, but a ‘Holy Ampoule’ said to contain this miraculous oil was to become a staple of French kingship, not only in the Middle Ages but through the 19th-century Bourbon Restoration. You can still see the ampoule – or rather, its post-revolutionary reconstruction – in Reims’ cathedral treasury today.

The Carolingians’ last stand

Hugh’s kingship thus rested on the firm foundation of his barons’ approval and ritual connections with both the Carolingian and Merovingian dynasties that preceded him. Later in the year of his coronation, he further strengthened his family’s hold on the throne by having his son Robert crowned associate king, making explicit the expectation of Robert’s eventual succession. Hugh even had the monk Gerbert write to Constantinople asking for a Byzantine princess to be Robert’s queen – though no such princess ever materialised. All these efforts did not, however, protect the new dynasty from opposition. In tenth-century West Francia, where the balance of power was always shifting, great men and women were ever on the look-out for any advantage. Charles of Lorraine, passed over at the Senlis assembly, was gathering support from those who now viewed Hugh as a bit too powerful. In 988 Charles and his allies went to war, hoping to wrest West Francia from Hugh and his son.

This war provided much fodder for the Sens chronicler’s later misinterpretations. There was, indeed, ample evidence of treachery. Hugh’s eventual victory can be credited to the duplicity of Adalbero’s nephew, the bishop of Laon who had supposedly had a relationship with Louis V’s mother. The bishop had fled Laon early in the hostilities but then later wormed his way into Charles of Lorraine’s confidence, only to hand him over to Hugh. The Sens chronicle recounts that Charles was then imprisoned at Orléans, but we know little more. With his capture, the Carolingian resistance was over. When Hugh died in 996, his body was buried with honour in the abbey of Saint-Denis north of Paris, the traditional resting place of Frankish kings since Merovingian times. His son Robert succeeded him without opposition. The legitimacy of Hugh and his line must have seemed secure.

Prophecies and allegations

Ironically, given his machinations on Hugh’s behalf, it was Gerbert’s fault that the Sens chronicle’s story of usurpatory treachery took hold. Soon after Hugh’s victory, Gerbert left West Francia for Ottonian Germany, taking the only copy of Richer’s chronicle with him; when he later moved to Italy to become bishop of Ravenna and then pope, he left the manuscript behind, and it was not rediscovered until 1839. With Richer’s account languishing in obscurity, the Sens version became so popular that it even appeared in chronicles composed for the Capetians themselves. Around 1040 the story gained a new dimension with the rise of a prophecy that explained the Capetians’ accession as a saintly reward for Hugh’s help in returning some relics to their rightful owners. But, the prophecy warned, the crown of France had only been lent to the Capetians; it would return to the Carolingian line after seven generations. When the prophecy first gained currency, Hugh’s grandson, the third-generation Capetian king, was reigning and the seventh generation was a far-off prospect. Its claim of divine approval probably looked like a welcome boost to the dynasty’s prestige, though naturally as the generations passed it began to seem rather less so.

By the time the seventh Capetian king, Philip II Augustus, died in 1223, the dynasty had achieved so much that archaic prophecies and ancient allegations ought not to have mattered any more. Their old enemies the Plantagenets had almost been driven from the continent, their treasury was overflowing and even the vast lands of the Languedoc were almost in their grasp. That they began to call some of their sons ‘Charles’ – a name that the dynasty had always avoided for its Carolingian associations – suggests that they were feeling at least a little less worried about it. But by then they had also found a new way to spin the old legend. Around 1200 it began to be suggested that Philip’s son, the future Louis VIII, should be considered a true Carolingian because his mother was descended from Charlemagne, as was – it turned out – Philip’s own mother. The prophecy that the crown would return to the Carolingian line after seven generations thus came true, but in a way that explained why the Capetians kept the throne anyway.

It was a neat get-out, but not everyone was convinced, including the later Capetians themselves. Even at the turn of the 14th century the spectre of usurpation still haunted them. In 1301, when the 11th Capetian king Philip IV heard that an incautious (and possibly drunk) bishop had mentioned Hugh Capet’s ‘usurpation’ among other insulting remarks, he had the man arrested, ignoring the benefit of clergy that ought to have shielded him from secular justice and setting off an ecclesiastical firestorm that led ultimately to the death of Pope Boniface VIII and the papacy’s installation at Avignon. Of course, although France never did return to Carolingian hands it left those of the Capetians not long after. In 1328 the dynasty went extinct in the direct male line with the death of Philip IV’s youngest son and passed to the family of Philip’s nephew, the Valois. That transfer set off a new dynastic dispute, the origins of what we now call the Hundred Years War.

Justine Firnhaber-Baker is Professor of History at the University of St Andrews and the author of House of Lilies: The Dynasty that Made Medieval France (Allen Lane, 2024).