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This chapter focuses on French chivalric literature. It describes the differences between Capetian and Plantagenet political culture. Chevalerie and royauté agreed on the inevitability, desirability, and importance of war. However, the relationship between the two was not the same everywhere. Monarchy in England and France followed different timetables. These differences shaped the interaction between kingship and chivalry in each realm.

This chapter discusses chanson de geste to demonstrate that the ambivalent role of chivalry in issue or order appears in entire works less than in passages selected from many works. It examines the role of literature in portraying the relationship of chivalry to Capetian royalty and to the reformed Church. It explores the three broad cycles of the corpus of chansons including the Cycle of the King, the Cycle of William of Orange, and the Cycle of the Barons in Revolt.

The prologue to part one explains the rise of Capetian power and rise of Capetian claims to form a saintly bloodline by the time of Philip II’s reign around 1200, and introduces members of the French royal family in the generation of Louis IX.

This chapter describes how, before his departure from Gascony in the autumn of 1243, Henry III had worked hard to set the province to rights. He had toured the duchy, reconciled competing factions, maintained his rights, and bolstered the defences against external attack, or at least tried to do so. But, as a would-be conqueror of Gascony had once said, it was like trying to plough the seashore. For the next ten years, Henry was never free from Gascon worries. They led him in 1248 to place the duchy under Simon de Montfort and, when that ended in disaster, they forced him in 1253 to go there himself, despite being now pledged to go on crusade. Henry's concentration on Gascony and commitment to the crusade reflected the more general international situation, which left him with little else to do. There was no chance of attempting to recover the lost continental empire. Indeed, the ten years between Henry's two sojourns in Gascony in 1243 and 1253 saw a significant shift in the European balance of power towards the Capetian kings of France.

Chapter one establishes the narrative and conceptual framework necessary to interpret this crucial period of crusading. In particular, it examines the state of Capetian France on the eve of the First Crusade. While many historians have considered this period, few have done so from a non-administrative perspective. That is to say, the prevailing narrative explains the rise of Capetian power in the early twelfth century in terms of fiscal centralization and land acquisitions that began at the end of the eleventh. This is not incorrect, but neither is it the full picture. Thus, this chapter argues that this period cannot be fully understood without considering the role of prestige in the transformative process. In this way, the pre-crusading history of France is an essential component in understanding the eventual impact of the crusades of the image and practise of kingship.

This chapter examines the succession in the Ottonian, Capetian, and Anglo-Saxon dynasties of the tenth and eleventh centuries. As it demonstrates, mothers and maternal lineage would play if anything an even more decisive role in determining legitimacy of heirs to royal and noble titles than found with the Carolingians. The alleged evidence for the exclusion of those born outside of Church-sanctioned marriages in these centuries does not survive careful scrutiny. Certainly we can find practices that give the impression of efforts to obey Christian teachings on marriage. This is, however, a mistaken impression. What looks on the surface like evidence of the role of legitimate marriage in royal succession is in fact evidence of other concerns; concerns that reflect how often, and in what ways, powerful people in the Middle Ages valued their women, at least as transmitters of lineage.