Philip the Fair crushed the Templars, humbled a pope and doomed his own dynasty
Handsome enough to be called le Bel, yet so cold that a bishop said he was neither man nor beast but a statue, Philip IV ran France through lawyers rather than lords. Deep in debt, he expelled the Jews, destroyed the Knights Templar and had a pope seized, and his grandson's claim later helped spark the Hundred Years' War.
Philip was born in 1268 at Fontainebleau, a grandson of Louis IX. Before he turned three his grandfather died on crusade, his mother died after a fall from her horse, and his father became Philip III. When his elder brother Louis died in 1276, rumours blamed their stepmother, Marie of Brabant, whose own first son had arrived that same month. At sixteen Philip married Joan I of Navarre, bringing him Navarre and the rich county of Champagne. The pair were devoted, and after she died in 1305 he never remarried, despite the political rewards on offer.
Crowned at Reims in January 1286, he kept aloof from the public and let ministers such as Guillaume de Nogaret take the blame for unpopular policies; one critical bishop compared him to a useless owl. His reign strengthened the royal council, the Parlement and the court of auditors, moving France from a feudal patchwork toward a centralised state.
Abroad he treated Edward I of England, who held Aquitaine as his vassal, strictly as a duke. After tricking Edward into handing over Gascony in 1294, Philip declared it forfeit, starting an inconclusive war and the Auld Alliance with Scotland. In 1302 Flemish rebels destroyed his knights at the Battle of the Golden Spurs, but victory at Mons-en-Pévèle two years later won him Lille, Douai and heavy reparations. He also received the Mongol envoy Rabban Bar Sauma, who proposed a joint war on the Mamluks, but never acted on it.
Money drove his harshest moves. Owing large sums to both, he expelled France's Jews in 1306 and wiped out the Templars from 1307. His effort to tax the Church led French troops and the Colonna family to seize Pope Boniface VIII at Anagni in 1303, and the popes soon moved to Avignon. In his last year an adultery scandal engulfed the wives of all three of his sons, who each reigned briefly and died without male heirs, and his daughter Isabella's marriage to Edward II gave England a claim to the French crown. He died on 29 November 1314.
Source: Philip IV of France
