Louis VIII of France
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.