The extant royal charters and the historiography of St-Denis offer a perspective on the Capetians that was highly configured by ecclesiastical concerns. From their Robertian origins the Capetians proclaimed their dynastic rights to the crown. The charters of Louis VI and Louis VII announced a new policy towards the commercial groups who converged upon towns in northern France spurred by the revival of trade at the turn of the eleventh century. Except for new attention to townspeople and Suger's ideological formulations Louis VI and Louis VII introduced few governmental innovations. Overshadowed by the might of the Anglo-Norman-Angevins, Philip Augustus was reluctant to respond to the call for the Third Crusade. As an aftermath of Bouvines, the last decade of Philip's reign may be characterized by the expected fruits of victory: peace, prosperity and the re-expression of ideology. Bouvines represented a victory of a Capetian king of the Franks over a Roman emperor.

King Richard I died outside the castle of Chalus-Chabrol in the Limousin on 7 April 1199. There were two candidates for the succession: his younger brother, John, and his nephew Arthur of Brittany, who was the protege of Philip Augustus. King Philip himself, under the Treaty of Le Goulet, accepted his succession to Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine, the dominions which the Plantagenets held as fiefs from the crown of France. Normandy was both the most valuable part of the Plantagenet continental empire and the most vulnerable, hence the absolute priority Philip Augustus attached to its conquest. While John, on the continent, succumbed to a monarch of his own size, in Britain he triumphed over inferior kings and princes. Noking of England came to the throne in a more desperate situation than Henry III. Yet, within a year, Louis had left the country, peace had been proclaimed and Henry was universally acknowledged as king.

This chapter describes the reign of several Capetian rulers namely, Louis VIII, Blanche of Castile, Louis IX, Philip III, and Philip IV. When he came to the throne in 1223, Louis VIII was confronted immediately with the need to secure the western territories which his father Philip Augustus had conquered from the English and to decide on a course of action with regard to the failing Albigensian Crusade. By 1231, Blanche of Castile and Louis had blocked a rapprochement between the Lusignan family and the English, stabilised the situation in Languedoc with the help of the cardinal-legate, deflected two major baronial coalitions bent on changing the nature of the regency and put down a Breton rebellion that had English support. The country over which Philip IV and his officials ruled was entering a period of economic difficulties, exacerbated if not necessarily caused by the steady growth of population over the last two centuries.