Людовик VIII
Charles was the youngest child of King Louis VIII of France and Blanche of Castile. The date of his birth has not survived, but he was probably a posthumous son, born in early 1227. Charles was his only surviving son to be "born in the purple" (after his father's coronation), a fact he often emphasised in his youth, as the contemporaneous chronicler Matthew Paris noted in his . He was the first Capetian to be named for Charlemagne.