page_title: History of the Catholic Church in France
section_title: Time of the Crusades
hierarchical_section_title: History of the Catholic Church in France / Time of the Crusades
caption_attribution_description: English: Miniature: Pope Urban II preaching at the Council of Clermont. Sébastien Mamerot, Les passages d'outremerFrançais&#160;: Le Pape Urbain II au concile de Clermont en 1095. Miniature tirée des Passages d'outremer de Sébastien Mamerot
context_page_description: The history of the Catholic Church in France is inseparable from the history of France, and should be analyzed in its peculiar relationship with the State, with which it was progressively confused, confronted, and separated.
context_section_description: "The reign of Louis VI (1108-37) is of note in the history of the Church, and in that of France; in the one because the solemn adhesion of Louis VI to Innocent II assured the unity of the Church, which at the time was seriously menaced by the Antipope Antecletus; in the other because for the first time Capetian kings took a stand as champions of law and order against the feudal system and as the protectors of public rights.
  A churchman, Suger, abbot of St-Denis, a friend of Louis VI and minister of Louis VII (1137-80), developed and realized this ideal of kingly duty. Louis VI, seconded by Suger and counting on the support of the towns – the "communes" they were called when they had obliged the feudal lords to grant them charters of freedom – fulfilled to the letter the rôle of prince as it was conceived by the theology of the Middle Ages. "Kings have long arms," wrote Suger, "and it is their duty to repress with all their might, and by right of their office, the daring of those who rend the State by endless war, who rejoice in pillage, and who destroy homesteads and churches." Another French Churchman, St. Bernard, won Louis VII for the Crusades; and it was not his fault that Palestine, where the first crusade had set up a Latin kingdom, did not remain a French colony in the service of the Church. The divorce of Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine (1152) marred the ascendancy of French influence by paving the way for the growth of Anglo-Norman pretensions on the soil of France from the Channel to the Pyrenees. Soon, however, by virtue of feudal laws the French king, Philip Augustus (1180–1223), proclaimed himself suzerain over Richard Coeur de Lion and John Lackland, and the victory of Bouvines which he gained over the Emperor Otto IV, backed by a coalition of feudal nobles (1214), was the first ever in French history which called forth a movement of national solidarity around a French king. The war against the Albigensians under Louis VIII (1223–26) brought in its train the establishment of the influence and authority of the French monarchy in the south of France.
  St. Louis IX (1226–1270), "ruisselant de piété, et enflammé de charité", as a contemporary describes him, made kings so beloved that from that time dates the royal cult, so to speak, which was one of the moral forces in olden France, and which existed in no other country of Europe to the same degree. Piety had been for the kings of France, set on their thrones by the Church of God, as it were a duty belonging to their charge or office; but in the piety of St. Louis there was a note all his own, the note of sanctity. With him ended the Crusades, but not their spirit. During the 13th and 14th centuries, project after project attempting to set on foot a crusade was made, showing that the spirit of a militant apostolate continued to ferment in the soul of France. The project of Charles Valois (1308–09), the French expedition under Peter I of Cyprus against Alexandria and the Armenian coasts (1365–67), sung of by the French trouvère, Guillaume Machault, the crusade of John of Nevers, which ended in the bloody battle of Nicopolis (1396) – in all these enterprises, the spirit of St. Louis lived, just as in the heart of the Christians of the East, whom France was thus trying to protect, there has survived a lasting gratitude toward the nation of St. Louis. In the days of St. Louis the influence of the French epic literature in Europe was supreme. Brunetto Latini, as early as the middle of the 13th century, wrote that, "of all speech [parlures] that of the French was the most charming, and the most in favour with everyone." French held sway in England until the middle of the 14th century; it was fluently spoken at the Court of Constantinople at the time of the Fourth Crusade; and in Greece in the dukedoms, principalities, and baronies founded there by the House of Burgundy and Champagne. And it was in French that Rusticiano of Pisa, about 1300, wrote the record of Marco Polo's travels. The University of Paris was saved from a spirit of exclusiveness by the happy interv
caption: Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont, given a late Gothic setting in this illumination from the Livre des Passages d'Outre-mer, of c. 1490 (Bibliothèque nationale).
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