King of France and Navarre (1316–1322), who seized the throne over his infant niece, established that women could not inherit the French crown, and reformed royal administration.
Philip V, called "the Tall", was king of France and Navarre from 1316 to 1322. The second son of Philip IV the Fair, he seized the throne in the crisis that followed the death of his brother Louis X, setting aside the claim of Louis's infant daughter Joan and having himself crowned — a coup that established the enduring principle that a woman could not inherit the French crown.
His brief reign proved surprisingly constructive. An intelligent and orderly ruler, he pursued a serious programme of administrative and financial reform, attempting to standardise coinage, weights, and measures across the kingdom and to regularise the royal finances, even as his reign was troubled by the popular unrest of the Pastoureaux and the persecution of lepers and Jews in 1320–1321.
Philip was born about 1291, the second son of Philip IV the Fair, and was made Count of Poitiers. Like his brothers he married into the Burgundian nobility, and his wife Joan of Burgundy was briefly caught up in the Tour de Nesle scandal but cleared. On the death of his brother Louis X in 1316 Philip, as the senior surviving brother, took charge of the kingdom as regent while the realm awaited the birth of Louis's posthumous child.
When that child, John I, died after five days, Philip moved quickly to make himself king rather than yield to the claim of Louis's young daughter Joan.
Philip V is generally reckoned the ablest of Philip the Fair's three sons. Where his brothers seem slight or unlucky, he shows as a shrewd, energetic, and methodical ruler with a genuine appetite for the business of government — a king who grasped the levers of administration and used them deliberately.
That competence had a hard, opportunistic edge. He took the throne by a swift political stroke, outmanoeuvring the supporters of his infant niece and securing an assembly's endorsement of the convenient doctrine that women could not succeed. Once crowned, the same decisiveness went into reform: he pressed forward with rationalising the coinage, the royal finances, and the machinery of state. He was a builder and organiser, whose orderly instincts were matched by a firm readiness to bend law and custom to his own advantage.
Having secured the crown, Philip V governed with unusual attention to administration. He worked to reform and centralise the royal finances, held reforming assemblies, and attempted the ambitious standardisation of coinage, weights, and measures throughout the kingdom — a rationalising vision far ahead of what his short reign could achieve.
His reign was shaken by the disorders of 1320–1321: the Pastoureaux, bands of poor "shepherds" who marched south attacking officials and Jews, and then a panic that accused lepers, and again Jews, of poisoning wells, unleashing savage persecution. Philip's government struggled to contain these upheavals.
Philip V died of illness on 3 January 1322, still only about thirty-one. Having no surviving son, he was succeeded — by the very principle of male-only succession he had himself established — by his younger brother, Charles IV, the last of Philip the Fair's sons to reign.
Philip V is remembered both as an unusually capable administrator and as the king whose seizure of the throne fixed the exclusion of women from the French succession. That precedent, devised to serve his own ambition, would outlast him spectacularly: within a generation it was being invoked to deny the crown to Edward III of England, Philip IV's grandson through the female line — one of the legal roots of the Hundred Years' War.