Philip Augustus spent his reign turning England's kings into losers in France
Before Philip II, French rulers called themselves kings of the Franks. He was the first to use the title King of France, and he earned it by grinding down the English Plantagenets, who held more French land than he did. His victory at Bouvines in 1214 even helped force Magna Carta on King John.
Philip was born at Gonesse on 21 August 1165, the long-awaited only son of Louis VII and Adela of Champagne, which is why he was first called Dieudonné, God-given. A hunting trip left him gravely ill; his father made a pilgrimage to Becket's shrine at Canterbury to pray for him and suffered a stroke on the way home. So the fourteen-year-old was crowned at Reims in November 1179, took the royal seal, married Isabella of Hainault the next April and was sole king by September 1180.
He grew the royal lands piece by piece, gaining Amiens in 1185, buying Clermont-en-Beauvaisis and taking Alençon. After a war with the Count of Flanders, a 1185 treaty handed him Artois and the Amiénois, and the monk Rigord began calling him Augustus for enlarging the realm. That growing revenue paid for knights, crossbowmen and mercenaries and let him become the first Capetian to build a navy in earnest. It was also partly squeezed from Jews, whom he ransomed and then expelled from his lands in 1182, letting them return in 1198.
His great project was breaking the Angevins, who ruled Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine and so were, on paper, his vassals. His method was friendship with Henry II's sons. He wept so hard at the funeral of Geoffrey of Brittany that he had to be held back from the grave, and in 1189 he and Richard the Lionheart chased the ailing Henry from Le Mans, forcing him to surrender territory days before his death. Once Richard, and later John, became king, Philip dropped them.
He joined Richard on the Third Crusade, leaving Vézelay in July 1190, and reached the siege of Acre in April 1191. Weakened by dysentery and irritated by Richard, he sailed home after the city fell to sort out the Flanders succession. Victory at Bouvines ended the Angevin empire, and by his death in 1223 he had walled Paris and left France the richest power in Europe.
Source: Philip II of France
