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.

At first sight it may seem surprising that the truncated and war-ravaged remnants of the crusader states should have lasted as long as they did. Directly after the Third Crusade there were few places in the Latin Kingdom other than Tyre and Acre that could have held out against full-scale assault. It is difficult to estimate the military resources at the disposal of the rulers of kingdom of Jerusalem in the thirteenth century. The ability of the military Orders to build and garrison substantial fortresses, take a share in the defence of the cities. The ports of the Latin east thus became the entrepots in what was evidently a most lucrative commerce. Trade and the wealth generated by trade were of the utmost importance to the rulers of Latin Syria. In the decades immediately following the Third Crusade the chief theatre of conflict in the east was Antioch.