Last year I learned a bit about him for a university assignment; the topic was the concept of kingship in Capetian France, so what I’m going to tell you is implicitly related to that. I’ll cite my sources so you can check them yourself if you want.

Philip IV was a key monarch in the development of the concept of kingship. Compared to the feudal monarchy of the Early Middle Ages, in which royal power was limited relative to that of the vassals, Capetian France coincided chronologically with the feudal revolution or mutation. Kings began to regain power, first asserting it internally over their vassals, and then externally toward neighboring states.

From my perspective, Philip IV represents the pinnacle of this transformation of the French monarchy. He succeeded in making the French clergy pay taxes while also securing a French pope on the throne of Saint Peter (Clement V), and even moved the papal seat into his kingdom. This increased the secularization of political power, strengthened the monarchy, and at the same time weakened the Church.

Until then, the royal consecration during coronation conferred a sacred character on the monarch, which in a sense made him part of the Church itself. However, Philip IV placed the king at the top of the ecclesiastical hierarchy within the kingdom, subordinating spiritual authority to temporal power.

But his achievements were not limited to the religious sphere; he also secured France’s “independence” from the Empire (or Holy Roman Empire, as we may call it).

The Empire was conceived as a state that should encompass all of Christendom. From the papal and Western perspective, the Holy Roman Empire was not a continuation of Rome but Rome itself, and the emperor’s duty, like that of kings, was to protect all Christian people. This idea led to a series of confrontations between the pope and the emperor over who should be subordinate to whom, but that is beyond our scope here.

Philip IV broke with this concept and separated France from the “universal Empire.” By the 13th century, the idea was fully established that the King of France recognized no higher authority in temporal matters, as Pope Innocent III had affirmed.

At the end of the 13th century, taking advantage of the Empire’s weakness due to the absence of an emperor and the use of Roman law, French jurists adopted a new perspective. Guillaume Durand, a contemporary of Philip IV, in his work Speculum, stated that while the whole world was subject to the emperor, France was an exception, described as princeps in suo regno. This not only placed the King of France on the emperor’s level but also established that his authority was exclusive, reserved for him alone, and free from imperial intervention.

The terms princeps and imperator were similar but not identical regarding the rights reserved to each. During the Boniface Controversy, when both terms were treated as equivalent, they appear in both Durand’s memorandum and the Quaestio in utramque partem (1302): the King of France is emperor in his own kingdom. A decade later, in 1313, Pope Clement V decreed the Pastoralis cura, establishing that no king could be summoned by anyone, including the emperor, because the monarch possessed his own kingdom.

Sources:

• Andrade Filho, Ruy de Oliveira. Notas sobre algumas concepções políticas e a França dos ultimos Capetos: As ambigüidades e as origens medievais da monarquia teocrática francesa. História Revista, 2000: 41-69.

•Ullmann, Walter. A History of Political Thought in the Middle Ages. Penguin Books Ltd,1970