The island city on the Seine that the Capetian kings made the capital of France: home of Notre-Dame, the Sainte-Chapelle and the University, besieged by Vikings in 885, and held by the English from 1420 to 1436.
Paris grew from an island. The Île de la Cité, where the Seine could be crossed and defended, held the Roman town of Lutetia, the Merovingian palace, the cathedral of Notre-Dame and the royal palace of the Capetian kings, and by about 1300 the city around it was the largest in Latin Europe, with perhaps 200,000 inhabitants.
Medieval Paris was three towns in one: the Cité of king and bishop, the merchant town of the Right Bank around the Grève and the markets of Les Halles, and the Latin Quarter of the schools on the Left Bank. Its history follows the growth of the French monarchy, from precarious dukes in the tenth century to kings who governed from the Louvre, and the crises of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that nearly broke it.
Lutetia was a modest Roman town until late antiquity, when its island walls made it a refuge. Clovis made Paris his principal residence after 508 and was buried in the church of the Holy Apostles on the Left Bank, later called Sainte-Geneviève after the saint who, by tradition, had rallied the city when Attila's Huns passed nearby in 451. Under Clovis's heirs Paris was one of several royal seats of divided Frankish kingdoms.
The Carolingians ruled from Aachen and the Rhineland, and Paris became a frontier town exposed to the Vikings who rowed up the Seine. Raiders sacked it in 845, when Charles the Bald paid them 7,000 pounds of silver to leave, and again in the 850s and 860s. In November 885 a great Viking army laid siege to the island. Count Odo and Bishop Gozlin held out for a year; the emperor Charles the Fat came, paid the Vikings off and let them pass upriver to plunder Burgundy, and Odo's defence made his family the rivals of the Carolingians.
Odo was chosen king of the West Franks in 888, and in 987 his great-nephew Hugh Capet founded the dynasty that ruled France for eight centuries. The early Capetians were weak kings whose real domain ran from Paris to Orléans, but Paris lay at its centre, and Abbot Suger, minister to Louis VI and Louis VII, made the royal abbey of Saint-Denis just north of the city the birthplace of Gothic architecture when its new choir was consecrated in 1144.
Philip II made Paris a capital in the full sense. Between about 1190 and 1215 he enclosed both banks within a new wall, built the fortress of the Louvre to guard the western approach, paved the main streets and kept the royal archives and treasury in the city. The cathedral of Notre-Dame, begun under Bishop Maurice de Sully in 1163, rose through the same decades, and the king's victory at the Battle of Bouvines in 1214 was celebrated in the streets for a week.
Louis IX built the Sainte-Chapelle in the palace on the Cité between about 1242 and 1248 to house the Crown of Thorns, which he had bought from the Latin emperor of Constantinople. Philip IV turned the palace into the seat of royal government, with the Parlement and the Chambre des comptes, and in 1302 assembled the first Estates General in Notre-Dame.
The schools that made Paris the intellectual capital of Latin Christendom grew around the cathedral and the abbeys of Sainte-Geneviève and Saint-Victor in the twelfth century, when students crossed Europe to hear Peter Abelard. By about 1200 the masters had organised themselves as a university; Philip II granted them royal privileges that year, and Pope Gregory IX's bull Parens scientiarum confirmed their independence in 1231.
Its theology faculty was the most authoritative in Europe. Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure taught there in the 1250s, Robert de Sorbon founded the college that became the Sorbonne in 1257, and its doctors were consulted on questions from the condemnation of Aristotelian propositions in 1277 to the ending of the Great Western Schism. In 1431 Paris theologians supplied the arguments used to condemn Joan of Arc at Rouen.
The Hundred Years' War brought Paris its worst century. After John II of France was captured at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, the merchants' provost Étienne Marcel led the city against the dauphin Charles, and in February 1358 his men murdered two of the dauphin's marshals in front of him; Marcel was killed that July as he prepared to open the gates to Charles of Navarre. As king, Charles V answered by building the Bastille and a new wall around the Right Bank.
Under the intermittently insane Charles VI the city became the prize in the civil war between Armagnacs and Burgundians. John the Fearless had Louis of Orléans murdered in a Paris street in 1407, Burgundian mobs massacred Armagnacs in 1418, and after the Treaty of Troyes Henry V entered Paris in 1420. The English held it for sixteen years: Joan of Arc was wounded attacking the Porte Saint-Honoré in 1429, the boy Henry VI was crowned king of France in Notre-Dame in 1431, and the Parisians opened their gates to the army of Charles VII in 1436.
Medieval Paris was organised by its river. The Grand Pont and the Petit Pont, both lined with houses and shops, joined the Cité to the two banks, and the Seine boatmen formed the most powerful association in the city, the marchands de l'eau, whose control of river traffic made their head, the provost of the merchants, the leader of the municipality; the ship on the city's arms comes from their seal. In 1357 Étienne Marcel bought the Maison aux Piliers on their riverside square, the Place de Grève, as the city's town hall.
Philip II moved the main market to Les Halles in 1183, building covered halls beside the cemetery of the Holy Innocents, the city's great burial ground, whose charnel arcades received a painted Dance of Death in 1424. The royal gibbet of Montfaucon stood outside the walls to the north-east, and to the south the abbeys of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Sainte-Geneviève held their own jurisdictions over suburbs that the city slowly absorbed.