France in the Middle Ages Totally Explained

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France in the Middle Ages covers an area roughly corresponding to modern day France, from the death of Charlemagne in 814 to the middle of the 15th century. The Middle Ages in France were marked by

Western Francia (843-987) and the Viking invasions and the piecemeal dismantling of the Carolingian Empire by local powers,
the elaboration of the seigneurial economic system and the feudal system of rights and obligations between lords and vassals,
the growth of the region controlled by the House of Capet (987-1328) and their struggles with the expanding Norman and Angevin regions,
a period of artistic and literary outpouring from the 12th to the early 14th centuries,
the rise of the Valois dynasty (1328-1589), the protracted dynastic crisis of the Hundred Years' War with the Kingdom of England (1337-1453) and the catastrophic Black Death epidemic (1348), and
the expansion of the French nation in the 15th century and the creation of a sense of French identity.

Geography

Discussion of the size of France in the Middle Ages is complicated by distinctions between lands personally held by the king (the "domaine royal") and lands held in homage by another lord. The notion of res publica inherited from the Roman province of Gaul wasn't fully maintained by the Frankish kingdom and the Carolingian Empire, and by the early years of the Direct Capetians, the French kingdom was more or less a fiction. The "domaine royal" of the Capetians was limited to the regions around Paris, Bourges and Sens. The great majority of French territory was part of Aquitaine, the Duchy of Normandy, the Duchy of Brittany, the Comté of Champagne, the Duchy of Burgundy, and other territories (for a map, see Provinces of France). In principle, the lords of these lands owed homage to the French king for their possession, but in reality the king in Paris had little control over these lands, and this was to be confounded by the uniting of Normandy, Aquitaine and England under the Plantagenet dynasty in the 12th century. Philippe II of France undertook a massive French expansion in the 13th century, but most of these acquisitions were lost both by the royal system of "apanage" (the giving of regions to members of the royal family to be administered) and through losses in the Hundred Years' War. Only in the 15th century would Charles VII of France and Louis XI of France gain control of most of modern day France (except for Brittany, Navarre, and parts of eastern and northern France).
The weather in France and Europe in the Middle Ages was significantly milder than during the periods preceding or following it. Historians refer to this as the "Medieval Warm Period", lasting from about the 10th century to about the 14th century. Part of the French population growth in this period (see below) is directly linked to this temperate weather and its effect on crops and livestock.

Demographics

France in the Middle Ages was the most populated region in Europe (and the third most populous country in the world, behind only China and India), although there were great differences in density between the populated north and the relatively unpopulated south. In the 14th century, before the arrival of the Black Death, the total population of the area covered by modern day France has been estimated at around 17 million. Paris, the largest city in Europe, may have had over 100,000 inhabitants. The Black Death killed an estimated one-third of the population from its appearance in 1348. The concurrent Hundred Years' War slowed recovery. It would be the mid-sixteenth century before the population recovered to mid-fourteenth century levels.
In the early Middle Ages, France was a center of Jewish learning, but increasing persecution, and a series of expulsions in the 14th century, caused considerable suffering for French Jews (see History of the Jews in France).

Language

ť For more information of the development of the French language, see French language and History of French.

Up to roughly 1340, the Romance languages spoken in the Middle Ages in the northern half of what is today's France are collectively known as "ancien français" ("Old French") or "langues d'oïl" (languages where one says "oïl" to mean "yes"): following the Germanic invasions of France in the fifth century, these northern dialects had developed distinctly different phonetic and syntactical structures from the languages spoken in southern France, which are collectively known as "langues d'oc" or the Occitan language family (of which the largest group is the Provençal language). In the east, Francoprovençal (considered a transitional language between "langues d'oïl" and "langues d'oc") and Germanic languages were spoken; in the far south, Catalan (considered a tranistional language between Iberian languages and "langues d'oc") was spoken. The Western peninsula of Brittany spoke Breton, a Celtic language. The various "Langues d'oïl" and "Langue d'oc" dialects developed into what are recognised as regional languages today. Languages that developed from dialects of Old French include: Bourguignon, Champenois, Franc-Comtois, Francien (theoretical), Gallo, Lorrain, Norman, Anglo-Norman (spoken in England after the Norman Conquest of 1066), Picard, Poitevin, Saintongeais and Walloon. Languages that developed from dialects of the Occitan family include: Auvergnat, Gascon, Languedocien, Limousin, Provençal, and, arguably, Catalan.
Because of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, medieval French was also spoken in the Anglo-Norman realm, including England, from 1066 to the 1300s.
From 1340 to the beginning of the seventeenth century, a standardised French language became clearly distinguished from the other competing Oïl languages. This is referred to as Middle French ("moyen français") and would be the basis of Modern French. Although French gradually became an important cultural and diplomatic language, it made few inroads into Occitan and other linguistic regions other than in areas where the French monarchy had established significant control.
Among educated elites, clercs, and members of the clergy, Medieval Latin was the predominant diplomatic and legal language in France until the middle of the 16th century.

History

The Carolingian Legacy

During the latter years of the elderly Charlemagne's rule, the Vikings made advances along the northern and western perimeters of his kingdom. After Charlemagne's death in 814 his heirs were incapable of maintaining political unity and the empire began to crumble. The Treaty of Verdun of 843 divided the Carolingian Empire, and Charles the Bald ruled over Western Francia, roughly corresponding to the territory of modern France. This kingdom would evolve over centuries into the modern nation state of France.
Viking advances were allowed to escalate, and their dreaded longboats were sailing up the Loire and Seine Rivers and other inland waterways, wreaking havoc and spreading terror. In 843 Viking invaders murdered the Bishop of Nantes, and a few years after that, they burned the Church of Saint Martin at Tours, and in 845 the Vikings sacked Paris. During the reign of Charles the Simple (898-922), Normans under Rollo were settled in an area on either side of the Seine River, downstream from Paris, that was to become Normandy.

The Capetians

The Carolingians were subsequently to share the fate of their predecessors: after an intermittent power struggle between the two families, the accession (987) of Hugh Capet, Duke of France and Count of Paris, established on the throne the Capetian dynasty which with its Valois and Bourbon offshoots was to rule France for more than 800 years.
   The Carolingian era had seen the gradual emergence of institutions which were to condition France's development for centuries to come: the acknowledgement by the crown of the administrative authority of the realm's nobles within their territories in return for their (sometimes tenuous) loyalty and military support, a phenomenon readily visible in the rise of the Capetians and foreshadowed to some extent by the Carolingians' own rise to power.
   The old order left the new dynasty in immediate control of little beyond the middle Seine and adjacent territories, while powerful territorial lords such as the 10th and 11th-century counts of Blois accumulated large domains of their own through marriage and through private arrangements with lesser nobles for protection and support.
   The area around the lower Seine, ceded to Scandinavian invaders as the Duchy of Normandy in 911, became a source of particular concern when Duke William took possession of the kingdom of England in the Norman Conquest of 1066, making himself and his heirs the King's equal outside France (where he was still nominally subject to the Crown).
   Worse was to follow. A protracted succession dispute among William's descendants ended in 1154 with the coronation of Henry II. Henry had inherited the Duchy of Normandy through his mother, Mathilda of England, and the County of Anjou from his father, Geoffrey of Anjou, and in 1152, he'd married France's newly-divorced ex-queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who ruled much of southwest France. After defeating a revolt led by Eleanor and three of their four sons, Henry had Eleanor imprisoned, made the Duke of Brittany his vassal, and in effect ruled the western half of France as a greater power than the French throne. However, disputes among Henry's descendants over the division of his French territories, coupled with John of England's lengthy quarrel with Philip II, allowed Philip II to recover influence over most of this territory. After the French victory at the Battle of Bouvines in 1214, the English monarchs maintained power only in southwestern Duchy of Guyenne.
   The 13th century was to bring the crown important gains also in the south, where a papal-royal crusade against the region's Albigensian or Cathar heretics (1209) led to the incorporation into the royal domain of Lower (1229) and Upper (1271) Languedoc. Philip IV's seizure of Flanders (1300) was less successful, ending two years later in the rout of his knights by the forces of the Flemish cities at the Battle of the Golden Spurs near Kortrijk (Courtrai).

The Hundred Years' War

The death of Charles IV in 1328 without male heirs ended the main Capetian line. Under Salic law the crown couldn't pass through a woman (Philip IV's daughter was Isabella, whose son was Edward III of England), so the throne passed to Philip VI, son of Charles of Valois. This, in addition to a long-standing dispute over the rights to Gascony in the south of France, and the relationship between England and the Flemish cloth towns, led to the Hundred Years' War of 1337-1453. The following century was to see devastating warfare, peasant revolts (the English peasants' revolt of 1381 and the Jacquerie of 1358 in France) and the growth of nationalism in both countries.
   French losses in the first phase of the conflict (1337-1360) were partly reversed in the second (1369-1396); but Henry V's shattering victory at the battle of Agincourt in 1415 against a France now bitterly divided between rival Armagnac and Burgundian factions of the royal house was to lead to his son Henry VI's recognition as king in Paris seven years later under the 1420 Treaty of Troyes, reducing Valois rule to the lands south of the Loire River.
   France's humiliation was abruptly reversed in 1429 by the appearance of a restorationist movement symbolised by the Lorraine peasant maid Joan of Arc, who claimed the guidance of divine voices for the campaign which rapidly ended the English siege of Orléans and ended in Charles VII's coronation in the historic city of Reims. Subsequently captured by the Burgundians and sold to their English allies, her execution for heresy in 1431 redoubled her value as the embodiment of France's cause.
   Reconciliation between the king and Philippe of Burgundy (1435) removed the greatest obstacle to French recovery, leading to the recapture of Paris (1436), Normandy (1450) and Guienne (1453), reducing England's foothold to a small area around Calais (lost also in 1558). After victory over England, France's emergence as a powerful national monarchy was crowned by the "incorporation" of the Duchy of Burgundy (1477) and Brittany (1532), which had previously been independent European states.
   The losses of the century of war were enormous, particularly owing to the plague (the Black Death, usually considered an outbreak of bubonic plague), which arrived from Italy in 1348, spreading rapidly up the Rhone valley and thence across most of the country: it's estimated that a population of some 18-20 million in modern-day France at the time of the 1328 hearth-tax returns had been reduced 150 years later by 50% or more.

Economy

The period after the death of Charlemagne was marked by an economic crisis caused by political instability. Town life all but disappeared. However, this had changed by the eleventh century. The introduction of new crops, the improvements in the climate, and the introduction of new agricultural technologies created a large agricultural surplus. This was accompanied by the growth in town life, trade, and industry. The economy once again collapsed in the fourteenth century because of war, bad weather, and the Black Death.
The rural economy was based on the manor; in urban areas economic activity was organized around guilds.

Government

France had a feudal system of government; the royal power was extremely limited. In rural areas feudal lords handled matters such as defense, and the maintenance of law and order. This was the result of the chaos that followed the Germanic and Viking invasions.
In urban areas popular agitation led to the setting up of autonomous "communes" that served as units of self-government.

Literature

For the literature of Northern France written in one of the Old French languages ("langues d'oïl") and (later) Middle French, see: Medieval French literature.

For the literature of Southern France written in one of the Occitan languages, see Provençal literature.

For the literature written in the "langue d'oïl" Anglo-Norman language during the Norman rule of England, see Anglo-Norman literature.

Art

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