Capetian dynasty

“ Thus the triple alliance of Adalbero’s bold and adroit imperialism with the cautious and vacillating ambition of the duke of the Franks, and the impolitic hostility towards Germany of the ruined Carolingians, resulted in the unlooked-for advent of the new Capetian dynasty. ”

“ The Capetian kings posed as the lawful successors of the Carolingians: they had the same conceptions of sovereignty, and followed the same principles of government. |Its results.| Yet those are not far wrong who regard the accession of Hugh as the starting-point of all later French history. It is easy to exaggerate the nature of the change. It is unsafe to make the change of dynasty a triumph of one race over another. ”

“ Note that; that it was by an election of the feudal lords, not because he had a hereditary right—that is, a right by birth—to the throne, that he became king. And how long that dynasty of the Capetian kings, as they are called, lasted in France you may realise from the fact, which you most likely will remember, that the king who was guillotined during the French revolution was called "Louis Capet" by those revolutionists who proclaimed that all men were equal and that titles of all kinds were to be done away. ”

“ Hug, Leonhard, a Catholic theologian and biblical scholar, author of an “Introduction to the New Testament” (1765-1846) .
Hugh Capet, the first of the Capetian dynasty of France, son of Hugh Capet, Count of Paris; proclaimed king in 987; his reign was a troubled one by the revolt of the very party that had raised him to the throne, and who refused to own his supremacy; Adelbert, a count of Périgueux, had usurped the titles of Count of Poitiers and of Tours, and the king, sending a messenger to ask “Who made you count?” got for answer the counter-challenge “Who made you king?” ”

“ Weaker than the bishops, the abbots looked up even more than the secular prelates to the royal support against the grasping and simoniacal lay-lords. The king favoured the Cluniac reformers, knowing that the more earnest the Churchmen, the more they would be opposed to feudal influence. Thus it was that every great Church fief was a centre of royal influence. Over the Church lands of central France—the provinces of Sens, Reims, Tours, and Bourges—the early Capetian was a real king. ”

“ The royal power, besides, had not yet a material force sufficiently great to dominate everywhere as absolute master. Under the two first lines, it was exercised in the same degree over all points of the territory; from the accession of the third, on the contrary, it was only a power of two degrees, having a very unequal action according to the territory and the locality. A part of France composed the royal domain; it was the patrimony of the Capetian house, increased by conquest or successive acquisitions. ”

“ Neither the resources of a mediæval monarch, nor the conditions of the time, made it possible for the king to permanently appropriate to himself an indefinite extent of domain, nor to deprive his kinsmen of the state due to their exalted birth. If the policy of Louis lost Artois to France for many centuries, it made it 408possible for Alfonse and Charles to act as the most efficient pioneers of the Capetian monarchy in the South. The rule of a royal prince over his appanage was often the best transition from pure independence towards complete incorporation with the monarchy. ”

“ Yet, even in the feeble reigns of the first four Capetian kings, it is plain that France had begun a new existence. The history of the Carolingians is a history of decline. The history of the Capetians is a story of progress. While beyond the Rhine and Alps the continuance of the imperial theory choked the growth of German and Italian national life, the disappearance of these remnants of the past proved a blessing to Gaul. The history of modern Europe is the history of the development of nationalities. ”

“ Three Capetian kings, Louis VII., Philip Augustus, and Louis IX., themselves headed several of the wild expeditions.
It is the influence of the Crusades on the French monarchy that we alone need to notice in this place. They tended very materially to weaken the power and influence of the feudal nobility, and in a corresponding degree to strengthen the authority of the crown and add to its dignity. The way in which they brought about this transfer of power from the aristocracy to the king has been explained in the chapter on the Crusades (see p. 450) . ”

“ There are irregularities and scandals which the great qualities and the personal glory of princes may cause to be not only excused but even forgotten, though certainly the three Capetians who immediately succeeded the founder of the dynasty offered their people no such compensation; but it must not be supposed that they had fallen into the plight of the sluggard Merovingians or the last Carlovingians, wandering almost without a refuge. A profound change had come over society and royalty in France. ”

“ He was a lean and solemn phantom, straying about among living men who were very rude and energetic. The phantom kept constantly growing leaner, but royalty did not vanish. People were accustomed to its existence, and the men of those days could not conceive of a revolution. By the election of Hugh Capet, in 987, royalty became a reality, because the king, as Duke of Francia, had lands, money, and followers. It would be out of place to seek a plan of conduct and a methodical line of policy in the actions of the Capetians, for they employed simultaneously every sort of expedient. ”

“ The electors were the chief lords and prelates of the regnum Francorum. But following a clever policy, each king during his lifetime took as partner of his kingdom his eldest son and consecrated and crowned him in advance, so that the first of the Capetians revived the principle of heredity in favour of the eldest son, while establishing the hereditary indivisibility of the kingdom. ”

“ The German party at Laon could not withstand the combined power of Rouen and Paris. Thus with Hugh Capet, the founder of the Capetian line, the kingdom of France began, having Paris for its capital; and the name of France came gradually to be applied to the greater part of Gaul. But when Hugh Capet became king, the great feudal states were almost independent of the royal control. Eight were above the rest in power and extent. "The counts of Flanders, Champagne, and Vermandois, and the dukes of Normandy, Brittany, Burgundy, and Aquitaine, regarded themselves as the new king's peers or equals." ”

“ The Capetian territory bristled with hostile castles, permanent obstacles to commerce between the larger towns and intolerable plagues to the country people. In short, the king of France, in spite of the dignity of his title, no longer dared to move about his own narrow domain. He to whom the most powerful lords owed homage could not venture out of Paris without encountering fortresses constructed by noble brigands, who were the terror alike of priest, merchant, and laborer. Without money or soldiers, royalty vegetated within its diminished patrimony. ”

“ To restore the independence of such a republic would be the renewal of a terrible blunder, postponing to a distant epoch the pacification and the advancing civilization of the whole land. The Cape Dominion we have been endeavoring to construct, when out of its tutelage, and leavened sufficiently with English influences, will form a noble country of the future. ”

“ Divided as was all the western world, there was no part of it more utterly divided in feeling and interest than the kingdom of the West Franks. When the early Capetians were carrying on their petty warfare in the regions between Seine and Loire, or making their vain progresses and emphasising their barren claims over more distant regions, half a score of feudal potentates as able, as wealthy, and as vigorous as themselves were building up a series of local states with foundations as strong, and patriotism as intense, as those of the lords of Paris. ”

“ Then why not a republic, Galeazzo?'
The Duke, as utterly impassive as if he were deaf, turned musingly to Lascaris.
'I heard one talk once,' said he, 'of a confederacy of republics, as who should say, An army all serfs. Words! The tails must obey the heads. Every ox knows it.'
'Saving the frog-ox,' giggled the Greek, 'who bursts himself in emulation.'
'Ah!' murmured the Duke, 'the frog-ox: see us tickle his self-puffery.'
He feigned to catch sight all at once of Montano. His eyes opened wide in astonishment: he held out his hands.
'What!' he cried, 'the man of visions! the very man! ”

“ Amidst this vast chaos and upon this double ruin was formed the feudal system, which by transformation after transformation became ultimately France. Hugh Capet, one of its chieftains, made himself its king. The Capetians achieved the French kingship. We have traced its character and progressive development from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, through the reigns of Louis the Fat, of Philip Augustus, of St. Louis, and of Philip the Handsome, princes very diverse and very unequal in merit, but all of them able and energetic. ”

“ The conquest of the royal domain. There was a real danger of the hereditary domain of the Capetians slipping away as completely from the control of the house of Capet as the more remote regions which only acknowledged the king as suzerain. The proprietor of the strong tower of Montlhéry could block the road between Paris and Orléans, and the bishops and abbots of the Isle de France, the most faithful supporters of the crown, had to witness the constant aggressions of a swarm of petty tyrants. ”

“ Whereas the Capetian monarchs, during the three hundred years that followed on the election of Hugh Capet in 987, always left an heir male, and an heir male of full age, the German kings again and again, during the same period, either left a minor to succeed to their throne, or left no issue at all. The principle of heredity began to fail because there were no heirs. ”

“ These men, having expelled the farmers, have wasted and squandered your revenues, are raising this same Capua into the seat of a new republic, are preparing a vast mass to be an enemy to the old republie. But if our ancestors had thought that any one in such an illustrious empire, in such an admirable constitution as that of the Roman people, would have been like Mareus Brutus or Publius Rullus (for these are the only two men whom we have hitherto seen, who have wished to transfer all this republic to Capua) , they would not, in truth, have left even the name of that city in existence. ”

“ Much of the loyalty, about which such a fuss was made at the Cape, was loyalty to the sovereign in the pocket, and not loyalty to the Sovereign on the throne. This concern for wealth was seen in many aspects of life in South Africa, and occasionally invaded drastically the realm of social well-being. ”

“ While Germany and the fictitious Empire linked with it were thus dropping from the foremost place in western Europe into the background, several kingdoms were slowly emerging out of the anarchy of feudalism, and acquiring the organization of authority and law which creates stable and substantial power. France for two centuries, under the first three Capetian kings, had made little progress to that end. ”

“ The government is in the hands of a governor, appointed by the crown, assisted by an executive council of five and a parliament of two houses; local government is in vogue all over the country; education is well cared for; the university of the Cape of Good Hope was founded in 1873. Discovered by the Portuguese Diaz in 1486, the Cape was taken possession of by the Dutch in 1652, from whom it was captured by Great Britain in 1805. ”

“ Undoubtedly disloyalty to the British Empire throughout South Africa has its fons et origo not in the Transvaal but at the Cape. For the moment the Bond lies low. It has gained everything it can hope to gain for the present. This the most superficial student of Cape politics can see. The problem of how to reconcile divergent elements at the Cape, and to make the Cape Dutch as loyal to the Empire as the French Canadians to-day, not that their loyalty is unimpeachable, is an extremely complicated one. ”

“ For you the Campanian soil shall be tilled, for you the city of Capua shall be thronged; you we shall regard as our founders, our parents, yes, even as gods; there is not a single one amongst your colonies that will surpass us in devotion and loyalty towards you. Be gracious, senators, to our prayers and manifest your divine will and power on behalf of the Campanians, and bid them entertain a certain hope that Capua will be safe. ”

“ It enabled a Capuan to own Roman land, to settle on the ager publicus, to marry into the noble houses of Rome, and to serve, not in the auxiliary cohort, but in her army or in the legion raised from the municipes. But meanwhile his own magistrate, the meddix tuticus, administers in the Campanian courts the native Sabellian law, [1427] his senate deliberates, and his popular assembly decides. Sometimes, as in the case of Capua, the state is still bound by treaty relations to Rome, and the two conflicting principles of armed alliance and of absorption are for once commingled. ”

“ At the time when Hugh Capet drew near his royal destiny, his brother was Duke of Burgundy, the Dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine were his brothers-in-law, and Adalberon, Archbishop of Rheims, was his partisan. As a king elected by his peers, his royal rights were only such as sprang from the feudal homage and fidelity which they tendered him. Yet he, with the clergy, deemed that his consecration by the Church gave him the prerogatives of Frankish sovereigns, which were patterned on those of Roman emperors and Old Testament kings. ”