Philip II of France

Philip II, known as Philip Augustus, ruled from 1180 to 1223 and turned the French crown from a modest power around Paris into the dominant force in western Europe. His central achievement was breaking the hold of the English Angevin kings on northern and western France, sealed by his victory at Bouvines in 1214. He was also the first ruler to call himself King of France rather than King of the Franks, a style he adopted from 1190.

Philip was born at Gonesse on 21 August 1165, the long-awaited only son of Louis VII and Adela of Champagne, and was nicknamed Dieudonné, "God-given". With his father in failing health, he was crowned at Reims in November 1179 at the age of fourteen and effectively ruled from then on; Louis VII died in September 1180. His marriage to Isabella of Hainault brought him Artois, and a dispute with the Count of Flanders ended in 1185 with the king gaining Amiens and other lands. The monk Rigord called him "Augustus" for enlarging the royal domain. In 1182 he expelled the Jews from the royal lands and seized their property, allowing them back in 1198.

The greatest landholders in France were the kings of England, who as dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine and counts of Anjou held far more of the country than the French king himself. Philip set out to dismantle that power, chiefly by encouraging the sons of Henry II to rebel against their father. In 1189 he and Henry's son Richard drove the ailing king into a humiliating settlement, and Henry died days later.

Philip then joined Richard I and the emperor Frederick Barbarossa on the Third Crusade. He was at Acre when it surrendered in July 1191, but, ill with dysentery and needed at home to settle the succession to Flanders, he soon returned to France, leaving most of his army behind. Once home he plotted with Richard's brother John and invaded Normandy while Richard was a prisoner in Germany. After Richard's release in 1194 the war turned against Philip, and by late 1198 the English king had recovered almost everything lost.

Richard's death in 1199 changed the balance. In 1200 Philip made peace with the new king, John, at Le Goulet, but soon took up complaints from John's vassals in Aquitaine. When John's nephew Arthur of Brittany vanished in 1203, widely believed murdered on John's orders, opinion turned against the English king. Philip overran Normandy, and by the end of 1204 he held most of the Angevin lands north of the Loire and much of Aquitaine.

John answered by building a coalition with his nephew, the emperor Otto IV, and the Count of Flanders. While John was driven back on the Loire, Philip met Otto's army near Bouvines, close to Lille, on 27 July 1214. Philip's force is put at around 7,000 against roughly 9,000 allies. The French king was unhorsed and saved by his armour, but the coalition broke and fled. The Battle of Bouvines cost Otto his throne, which passed to Frederick II, and left John so weakened that his barons forced him to accept Magna Carta the following year.

Philip's private life was turbulent. A day after marrying Ingeborg of Denmark in 1193 he rejected her and sought an annulment; when he took a new wife, Agnes of Merania, Pope Innocent III placed France under an interdict from 1199 to 1200. At home Philip strengthened royal administration and finances and built up a navy. In Paris he paved streets, built Les Halles market, a new city wall and the first Louvre, and chartered the university in 1200. He kept aloof from the crusade against the Cathars in the south, though his nobles took part. He died at Mantes on 14 July 1223 and was buried at Saint-Denis, succeeded by his son Louis VIII, the father of Louis IX.

Our 1200 map shows the Kingdom of France in the middle of his reign, just before the conquest of Normandy changed the balance with England.