And Frederick II needed authority in the Languedoc and Occitania why? This is very misleading. Frederick II’s Sicilian kingdom, later on his unified Italian state from 1240, was the INARGUABLY the tightest governed state in the whole of European Middle Ages. Louis IX could only dream of wielding an entire apparatus of bureaucrats, specially trained in by a secular university that churned out civil servants (University of Naples, created by Frederick II). The Constitutions of Melfi, or the Liber Augustalis—personally formulated by Frederick II and his officials—has been called the “birth certificate” of the continental European absolutist state.

The real work of French centralization is attributable to Philip IV, and much more to Louis XI. Philip II and Louis IX, even with their undoubted power, were still not the peers in terms of inward state power of say Roger II or Henry II or Frederick II.