Philip III "the Bold" (1270–1285), proclaimed king in the crusader camp at Tunis, absorbed the county of Toulouse into the royal domain and died on the disastrous crusade against Aragon.
Philip III has the historical misfortune of standing between the saint and the iron king — son of Louis IX, father of Philip IV. Diffident and devout, he was proclaimed king beside his father's deathbed at Tunis in 1270 and brought five royal coffins home from that plague-ridden crusade.
His reign's solid gain was enormous: the death of his uncle Alphonse of Poitiers in 1271 brought Toulouse, Poitou, and the Auvergne into the royal domain, carrying the crown's direct rule to the Mediterranean. Its ruin was the papally-sponsored crusade against Aragon after the Sicilian Vespers, which killed him and nearly wrecked the army of France.
Born at Poissy in 1245, Philip became heir at fifteen on his elder brother's death and grew up under the most demanding royal father in Christendom, whose written Enseignements to his son survive: rule justly, avoid war with Christians, love God before all.
He accompanied Louis IX on the Tunis crusade of 1270 and watched dysentery kill his brother-in-law, his father, and — on the terrible journey home — his own young wife and their newborn. He entered Paris in 1271 escorting a procession of coffins, and was crowned at Reims that August.
The nickname "le Hardi" — the Bold — honoured his personal conduct at arms, notably in the Foix campaign of 1272; nothing in his statecraft matched it. Contemporaries and the chronicle tradition agree on a gentle, pious, suggestible king, dominated in turn by his chamberlain Pierre de La Broce and by his forceful second queen, Marie of Brabant — when La Broce was hanged in 1278 after accusing the queen of poisoning Philip's heir, observers read it as the change of masters it was.
His confessor's and the abbey records' picture is of the good son overawed by a canonised father: scrupulous in devotion, faithful in the domain administration he inherited, and dangerously dependent on counsel. The decision that killed him — accepting the pope's offer of the Aragonese crown for his son against every strategic sense — was pressed on him by his uncle Charles of Anjou and the queen's faction over the objection of the ablest men at court.
The reign's permanent achievement came by inheritance law rather than war: when Alphonse of Poitiers and Joan of Toulouse died childless in 1271, their vast appanage — Poitou, the Auvergne, and the county of Toulouse with all Languedoc — reverted to the crown. Royal seneschals moved into Toulouse, and the treaty-work of his grandfather and father in the south was consummated. Navarre, too, came into the family orbit through the marriage of the heiress Joan to his son Philip in 1284.
The catastrophe grew from his uncle's empire. When the Sicilian Vespers (1282) threw Charles of Anjou's island kingdom to Peter III of Aragon, the French pope Martin IV excommunicated Peter, declared his crown forfeit, and bestowed Aragon on Philip's younger son Charles of Valois. The resulting "crusade" of 1285 took Girona after a hard siege while the Aragonese admiral Roger of Lauria destroyed the French fleet at Les Formigues; supply failed, dysentery swept the army, and the retreat over the Pyrenees became a running disaster. Philip, carried in a litter, died at Perpignan on 5 October 1285.
His bones went to Saint-Denis, his flesh — boiled from them in the fashion of distant royal deaths — to Narbonne. His son Philip IV, who had opposed the war, liquidated it immediately and drew from the fiasco the lesson that governed his own reign: never again would the French crown lend its army to papal projects; popes would instead learn to reckon with France.
Between Toulouse absorbed and Navarre acquired, Philip III enlarged the effective kingdom more than many abler kings — a reminder, historians have observed, that Capetian success was built as much on inheritance, marriage, and patience as on genius.