|
|
|
| Life Is The Path wrote: |
| *France was a very fluid concept at the time. Brittany, Calais, Aquitaine and I believe Champagne all held the right to be called English land. In the beginning, France was simply the land around Paris. As the Parisians became more powerful, they acquired more land, until wars with various English kings broke out, until, eventually, they came to hold all of France. |
France grew out of the kingdom of the West Franks, created in the treaty of Verdun in 843 which gave also birth to Germany. Splitting of the Frankish Empire between the three surviving sons of Louis the Pious(d.840) gave it's western parts to Charles the Bald(d.877).
At first the power of the king held in all those areas except Celtic Brittany, which had been and would continue to be independent for centuries. Then the central rule collapsed with the coming of the vikings, magyars and feodalism and the king would have little power outside of Ile-de-France - those central areas near Paris and Orleans - until the 12th century.
From 1491 onwards the French kings would gain control of Brittany through marriages and in 1532 the parliament in Rennes would accept the joining of Brittany to France.
But all those others were officially part of France, even when Aquitane had a tradition of local sub-kings. Aquitane was connected not to the English crown but to the Angevin family through marriage between it's heiress Eleanor(d.1204) and Henry II(d.1189), who became king of England in 1154. In a decision that had far-reaching consequences, Eleanor's first husband, Louis VII(d.1180) of France had divorced her and given up Aquitane because she gave him "only" daughters.
Henry held also Normandy, Anjou and Maine among others. The so-called Angevin Empire also briefly held Brittany under Henry's son Geoffroy(d.1186) and the latter's son Arthur(d.1203).
But the kings of England held all these other lands separately from their British possessions and officially as the vassal of the king of France. Even when the unfortunate Henry VI(d.1471) went to rule - as much as a a child and later a madman can rule - large part of northern France in competition with his maternal uncle Charles VII(d.1461), he did it officially in the role of king of France, not as a king of England. It needed Napoleon to force George III to give up the nominal title of king of France.
Champagne was never English, although many ties connected it to the Angevins. It was a powerful, semi-independent and also a major center of international trade thanks to it's Fairs. Counts of Champagne, like the Angevins, gained a foreign throne in the form of Navarre in 1234, but the extinction of the male line of the family in 1274 made the family's heiress a ward of the king of France, who naturally married her with his son. As a descendant of this union, Edward III of England had a minor and legally conflicted claim to Champagne as he had for the throne of France too.
_________________
Against apartheid, against racism, against Israel.
Last edited by Rouge77 on Wed Apr 13, 2011 5:48 pm; edited 1 time in total
|
|
