King of France (1285–1314), a ruthless centraliser who destroyed the Knights Templar, humbled the papacy, and greatly strengthened the French monarchy.
Philip IV, called "the Fair" for his handsome looks, was king of France from 1285 to 1314 and one of the most powerful and controversial of all medieval French kings. A cold, formidable centraliser who governed through able and ruthless lawyer-ministers, he pushed royal authority to new heights at the expense of the Church, the nobility, and his own creditors.
His reign is remembered above all for two great confrontations: his clash with Pope Boniface VIII, which ended with the papacy removed to Avignon under French influence, and his destruction of the wealthy Knights Templar, whom he had arrested, tortured, and burned while seizing their assets. He also fought a costly war with Flanders and repeatedly debased the coinage to fund his ambitions.
Philip was born in 1268, the son of Philip III the Bold. His marriage to Joan I of Navarre brought him that kingdom and the rich county of Champagne, and he succeeded his father as king of France in 1285. From the start he surrounded himself with a group of professional administrators and legists — men like Guillaume de Nogaret and Enguerrand de Marigny — through whom he would govern.
He inherited a strong monarchy and set about making it stronger still, treating the kingdom as a machine of law and revenue to be centralised under the crown.
Philip the Fair is one of the enigmas of medieval kingship. Contemporaries found him cold, silent, and unreadable — a magnificent, impassive figure whose intentions were impossible to guess, and who let his ministers take the blame for his harshest acts. Some saw a pious king manipulated by ruthless servants; others, a ruthless king hiding behind pious servants.
What is certain is the character of his rule: relentless, legalistic, and without sentiment where the power and solvency of the crown were concerned. He broke a pope, annihilated a crusading order, expelled Jews and Lombard bankers to seize their wealth, and debased his coinage without hesitation. Whether the driving will was his own or his ministers', the reign bears the stamp of a single ambition — the supremacy of the French crown over every rival, sacred or secular.
Philip's need for money brought him into collision with Pope Boniface VIII over the taxation of the clergy, a quarrel that escalated until the king's agents seized the aged pope at Anagni in 1303. Boniface died soon after, and within a few years the papacy had been drawn to Avignon, beginning the long period of French-dominated popes.
In 1307 Philip turned on the Knights Templar, the wealthy military order to which he was heavily in debt. He had its members arrested across France in a single coordinated swoop, extracted confessions of heresy under torture, and pressed the Avignon pope to suppress the order; its last grand master, Jacques de Molay, was burned in 1314. The crown absorbed much of the Templars' wealth.
Philip IV died on 29 November 1314, of a stroke following a hunting accident, only months after the burning of Jacques de Molay. He left three sons — the future Louis X, Philip V, and Charles IV — who would each reign in turn, and a daughter, Isabella, whose son would claim the French throne and help ignite the Hundred Years' War.
Philip the Fair left the French monarchy stronger, more centralised, and more feared than ever before, but also strained and resented. His humbling of the papacy and destruction of the Templars became bywords for the reach of royal power, and legend later imagined a "curse" of the Templars falling on his swiftly failing line. Within fourteen years all three of his sons had died without surviving male heirs, extinguishing the direct Capetian line and opening the disputed succession that led to the Hundred Years' War.