Fourth Capetian king of France (1060–1108), whose long reign slowly enlarged the royal domain but was overshadowed by his excommunication for a scandalous second marriage.
Philip I was the fourth Capetian king of France, reigning for forty-eight years from 1060 to 1108 — one of the longest reigns of any French monarch. He came to the throne as a boy of eight under the regency of his mother Anne of Kiev, and grew into a shrewd if unheroic ruler who patiently worked to strengthen the modest royal domain.
His reign spanned the age of the First Crusade, in which he took no part, and was clouded by his repudiation of his wife Bertha and his notorious union with Bertrade de Montfort, for which the Church repeatedly excommunicated him. For all the scandal, he added important territory around Paris and left the crown stronger than he found it.
Philip was born in 1052, the son of Henry I and Anne of Kiev, and given a Greek name unusual in the West — a mark of his mother's eastern royal background. Crowned co-king in 1059, he succeeded the following year as a child of eight, with his mother and Count Baldwin V of Flanders governing as regents.
Coming of age, he inherited the familiar Capetian problem: a crown rich in dignity but poor in land, hemmed in by great vassals, above all the Norman kings who now ruled England as well as their duchy.
Philip I is remembered as a canny, worldly, and unglamorous king — no crusader or warrior-hero, but a patient accumulator of advantage. Contemporaries, especially churchmen scandalised by his private life, were often hostile, painting him as greedy and self-indulgent; his later nickname "the Amorous" preserves the memory of the marriage that defined his reputation.
Beneath the scandal was a competent political operator. He understood that the crown's strength lay in slowly enlarging its own lands and playing its great vassals against one another, and he pursued that unspectacular strategy for half a century. He was the kind of king whose achievements are measured not in battles but in acres — the steady, self-interested consolidation on which his more famous successors would build.
Philip devoted his reign to the patient enlargement of the royal domain, buying, seizing, and inheriting lands — notably the Gâtinais, the Vexin, and Bourges — that thickened the crown's territory around Paris and the Loire. He kept clear of grand adventures, declining to join the First Crusade that carried off so many of his nobles after 1096.
His great scandal was matrimonial. Having repudiated his wife Bertha, he carried off and married Bertrade de Montfort, the wife of the Count of Anjou. The Church condemned the union as bigamous and adulterous, and Philip was excommunicated more than once, his lands laid under interdict, before an uneasy reconciliation late in his reign.
Philip I died on 29 July 1108, having in his last years associated his son Louis with the government of the kingdom. He chose to be buried not at Saint-Denis but at the abbey of Fleury (Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire). His son succeeded him as Louis VI.
Philip I is remembered as the king whose long, patient reign quietly repaired the fortunes of the Capetian crown after the weakness of his father's day. By steadily enlarging the royal domain and outlasting his rivals, he handed to his son Louis VI a monarchy with a firmer territorial base — the foundation on which the twelfth-century recovery of French royal power would be built. The scandal of his marriage, however, ensured that the Church remembered him less kindly than the crown had reason to.