PHILIP IV OF FRANCE, the Fair. - B. in 1268 at Fontainebleau, d. there on 29 Nov. 1314. Son of Philip III and Isabella of Aragon, he was instructed in the sciences by the cleric Guillaume d'Ercuis, to whom he remained always grateful. In 1284, at 16 years of age, he married Joan of Navarre, who brought him the Kingdom of Navarre and the districts of Champagne and Brie. In 1305 he was left a widower. At 17 years of age, in Oct. 1285, he succeeded his father Philip III.
In order to be able to understand and judge his government it is necessary to know his complex personality. P. has remained enigmatic down to the present day. The description that G. Nogaret left of him in the 6th to 7th apology (G. Dupeyrat, Histoire occisianique..., Paris 1643, pp. 438, 518) is nothing but an unhistorical embellishment, an idyllic portrait of one of the most cruel tyrants (Renan). While for some he is one of the principal representatives of an absolutist national regime, a cold calculator, who pursued without scruples the omnipotence of royal and state power, others condemn him for his hostile attitude toward the Church and the papacy, for his exclusively French national policy, which broke the unity of Christian Europe. Joined to a rigid and zealous orthodoxy, there was in him an energetic impulse of dominion that manifested itself in the aspiration to independence from the Pope and from the Emperor, in his tendencies to conquest, in his aiming to subject the French Church and the papacy, in founding the hegemony of France on solid bases in a scrupulous finance, on the army and on the fleet, and also in an unlimited avarice. Only in this double attitude of his — of a rigid orthodoxy and of a brutally tyrannical nature — do we have the whole P.
P.'s government appears almost modern. The part that his counsellors had in P.'s decisions is disputed. Certainly the lay legists such as Pierre Flotte, Guillaume de Nogaret, G. de Plaisan, Pierre Dubois etc., dominated by the spirit of Roman law, of the centralization and nationalization of the State, confirmed and encouraged the king.
His policy of annexation and expansion brought France, in the west and in the north, new territories. His financial policy provoked a grave conflict with Pope Boniface VIII, who in the bull Clericis laicos (25 Feb. 1296) protested against the taxation of the clergy. Once the affair was settled with the bull Etsi de statu (31 July 1297), the conflict broke out again in 1301, when Boniface VIII, through his legate Bernard de Saisset, reclaimed the injured rights of the Church. P. responded after the return of Bernard to his diocese, with his capture and his summons before the royal Assizes under accusation of high treason. The Pope requested his release and convoked the French prelates to a Council at Rome for 1 Nov. 1302, inviting P. as well, with the bull Ausculta fili (5 Dec. 1301), to justify himself before the Council.
In response P. assembled as early as 3 Feb. 1302 in Paris the assembly of the Estates General and stirred up a storm of national indignation with the reading of a falsified bull, Deum time, and a response to it (Sciat maxima tua fatuitas). Numerous writers took sides on the one and the other side and there was a rich pamphlet literature, comparable to that of the investiture controversy. To the bull, of decisive historical importance, Unam sanctam (18 Nov. 1302), in which P. was excommunicated, P. and the French Estates General responded by demanding the deposition of Boniface VIII. There followed shortly afterward the attack of Anagni, 7 Sept. 1303, which hastened the Pope's death (Oct. 1305). Benedict XI absolved P. from the excommunication. His successor Clement V submitted so greatly to P.'s influence that he withdrew the bulls of Boniface VIII, and transferred the residence to Avignon. In order to avoid the trial against Pope Boniface VIII, Clement V sacrificed the order of the Templars to the king's fiscalism.
Bibliography13 works
Lucchesio Späling