Catherine de’ Medici has just married into the monarchy of France, arguably the oldest surviving Catholic Christian monarchy in Europe. So it’s a good time to ask the question that would shape Catherine’s life: how was it that a monarchy that barred women and their children from the crown also had a long history of powerful women guiding it?
Transcript
So I hope you weren’t expecting for me to update you on French history up to the point of Catherine’s marriage in 1533. But for this episode I will give you a crash course on France’s monarchy, the institution that Catherine found herself literally wedded to, and what it meant to be a woman within it.
For starters, France’s monarchy began when a warlord from the Frankish confederation of German tribes named Clovis took over most of the territories that had been part of the old Roman province of Gaul. During the Christmas season of 508, Clovis converted from paganism to what would become Catholic Christianity, unlike most of the Germanic kings who were splitting up the old western Roman Empire who instead embraced the rival branch of Christianity, Arianism. This gave the French monarchy some cred as arguably the oldest surviving Christian monarchy in Europe. Over time, Clovis’ dynasty, the Merovingians, would be overthrown and replaced by their own right-hand men, the Carolingian family, who would find their apex in the Emperor Charlemagne. Even so, Clovis’ baptism became an important piece of legend and propaganda for the monarchy. The story began that when Clovis was baptized by the bishop Saint Remigius in the Cathedral of Reims, a dove brought down an ampulla filled with sacred oil. This was just a gloss on an older legend that Remigius had come across a dying pagan who wished to convert and he managed to miraculously fill an empty vial with baptismal oil with prayer. But besides that, the important thing was that by at least the eleventh century, the kings of France were anointed with oil just like the kings of ancient Israel, giving the whole monarchy a rather sacred dimension befitting the successors of Clovis. Never mind that the other European monarchs also got in the habit of having themselves anointed with sacred oil.
Flashfoward to 1066, King Louis V of France died without a son or brother. Instead of another Carolingian, the nobles and high clergy of France chose as their next king Hugh Capet. Hugh came from a powerful family that had long been powers behind the throne, much the same way as the Carolingians used to be to the Merovingians. In fact, Hugh’s uncle, grandfather, and great-uncle had all been kings themselves. At the time of Hugh’s election, there was hope that the monarchy would be an elective one, like what the Holy Roman Empire was becoming. But the Capetians were biologically luckier than the dynasties that ruled over the Holy Roman Empire, with kings who always had adult sons ready to rule when the time came. Also they discovered one weird trick where a reigning king would have his son crowned too during his lifetime, making the transition of legitimacy much smoother. So the Capetians would rule from 1066 until they were topped by a revolution, or maybe I should say the revolution, in 1792, with a relatively brief comeback from 1815 to 1848. Historians tend to break down the time of the Capetians into the Capetian, the Valois, and the Bourbon dynasties, but that’s just for the convenience of historians. In pure old-school, patrilineal terms, it was all one dynastic line.
And that’s because France was one of the minority of kingdoms that instituted what became known as the Salic Law, which forbade women or anyone descended from women in the royal family from inheriting the throne. The story of how the Salic Law got started in France is a little complicated, but I think it’s worth delving into for an idea of how attitudes toward women and gender get mixed up with raw power politics. See, in November of 1316 King Jean I of France I earned the distinction of being the first king of the Capetian dynasty to die without a son, and he died without a son because Jean himself was an infant born after the death of his own father, King Louis X. Jean’s death in the cradle left two candidates for the throne. On one side was Jean’s uncle, Philippe “the Tall.” On the other was Jean’s four-year-old sister Jeanne. A previous agreement Philippe made with Jeanne’s maternal uncle the Duke of Burgundy suggested he would have supported Jeanne becoming queen in the event of Jean’s death with Philippe ruling temporarily as a regent. But either because Jeanne was still a child or because Philippe had become ambitious for himself or both, Philippe made a bid for the throne. He summoned a conference of the Estates General who not only decided that Philippe the Tall should become King Philippe V of France, but interpreted the traditional succession in France as barring women from the succession. Jeanne had very few people if anyone in power looking after her interests apart from her uncle whom Philippe bought off by marrying him to his daughter and giving him some lands. Also Jeanne was only four or five years old, and of course the nobility was opposed to the very idea of a queen regnant. It didn’t help that Jeanne’s mother, Margaret of Burgundy, was involved in the biggest scandal of the fourteenth century. She along with her two sisters-in-law were accused of committing adultery with two knights. She probably died in prison, although one legend claims she was smothered between two mattresses. The fact it was widely suspected that she wasn’t even actually the daughter of a king did her case no favors.
A precedent was set. When Philippe V himself died five years later, there was apparently no question that his own daughters would be eligible to the throne. But the real test came when the throne passed on a cousin, Philippe of Valois, instead of to Philippe V’s sister Isabelle, Queen of England. In 1358, faced with two competitors for the French throne including Isabelle’s son King Edward III of England and Jeanne’s son Charles d’Evreux, a monk specializing in law named Richard Lescot was put to work. It wasn’t enough that France since Clovis never had a female queen rule in her own right. With a real lawyer’s ingenuity, he dug up an old law from the Merovingian era and claimed it proved that the exclusion of women from royal inheritance was an ancient principle of French law. It got its name, the “Salic Law”, from the name of the Salian Franks. The problem was that it was hardly a cornerstone of Frankish law, just a provision saying that land granted to someone by the king could not be inherited by a woman. There was even a later addendum saying that a woman actually could inherit the land if there were no male heirs left. But Richard Lescot did some creative interpretations, and so a sixth-century property law that didn’t even apply to all property and got changed anyway became the timeless basis for royal succession. Certainly the distaste for women rulers played a part in all this, but it was also a result of numerous political maneuverings and lost opportunities. Nonetheless, no woman would claim the crown of France in her own right for the rest of the history of the monarchy. Indeed, even among the current pretenders for the crown at a time when the chance of the French monarchy being restored is less than 1%, female succession and succession through the female line are still not valid.
Yet this doesn’t mean that in France women were shouldered out of power completely. No woman ever held the crown on her own, but there was a long history of powerful queen regents, a history that ran much deeper than that of the Salic Law. There were Brunhild and Fredegund, the sixth-century queen mothers whose vendetta against each other became the stuff of legend and opera. Then there was Balthild, the one-time slave who rose to the rank of queen and ruled as a regent in the seventh century, outlawing the sale of Christian slaves during her reign. By the time of the Capetians, there was Anna Yaroslavna, a princess from Kiev who wed King Henri I. While she signed the marriage contract with her own name in the Cyrillic alphabet, Henri only scratched out an “X”. She would become the only member of the French royal family who could sign official documents with her own hand. She ruled France as regent for her underage son Philippe after Henri’s death, but it seems that she was quietly elbowed out of power after she married a nobleman. The lesson remained clear even centuries later. A woman could rule on behalf of a young son, but she had to always prove her loyalty to the dynasty by remaining unattached to anyone but her dead husband as a good widow. No wonder for future queen regents accusing them of having lovers on the side was a potent and popular piece of slander.
More successful than Anna was Blanche of Castile, who not only ruled when her son Louis IX the future saint was a child, but while he was off on crusade. Jeanne of Burgundy briefly ruled several times for her husband Philippe VI while he was on campaign during the Hundred Years War. Anne de Beaujeau ruled on behalf of her brother Charles VIII while he was a child. Catherine was probably at least aware of these women, since she liked to cite historical precedents to her sons as a way to gently nudge them toward her point of view. But Catherine, when she arrived at the French court, had plenty of models from at least recent experience. One was King François’ own mother, Louise of Savoy. Savoy was a duchy in the Piedmont region, in the middle of France, Italy, and Switzerland. Its independence depended on a delicate game of playing its most overbearing neighbors, the Holy Roman Empire and France, off against each other. The people spoke a dialect of French, but culturally the region also leaned strongly to Italy. One day their ruling family would become the royal family of a united Italy, but that’s far beyond our scope.
Louise had died several years before Catherine’s marriage, but no doubt she learned all about her grandmother-in-law. During Francois’ military campaigns and his time as a prisoner of Emperor Charles V, she ruled France, but even when Francois was around she was an important advisor and a powerful figure in her own right. It was Louise who went to the courts to fight with Charles de Bourbon, the wealthiest and most well-connected nobleman in the realm, over a vast inheritance, driving him into the arms of Emperor Charles V. It was also Louise who in 1529 negotiated a peace deal with Charles V’s aunt Margaret of Austria, the Treaty of Cambrai, also rather condescendingly known as the “Ladies’ Peace.” Also involved in drawing up the terms of the treaty? Francois’ sister, Marguerite of Navarre, was a great patron of intellectuals and creatives, including Rabelais, author of the great satirical fantasy Gargantua and Pantegruel, and an avid writer herself. She also remained a major influence politically at Francois’ court. Of course, it’s harder to parse out exactly what Marguerite did, except in specific political events like the Ladies’ Peace. But I think it is safe to say she had about as much influence over politics as any minister of state, as did her and Francois’ mother. Still, her power was indirect, and as much as the king allowed her.
When talking about women and power in France, it’s something of a paradox. Women born into the royal family were officially barred from the crown. Yet women who married into it, who were always foreign women, could exercise as much power as the king under the right circumstances. Strangely, this was more or less the inverse of the situation in England, where queen regents were rare and tended to rule only briefly, like when Catherine of Aragon briefly took over for her husband Henry VIII while he was off fighting but eventually England came to accept women inheriting the crown. Why this was the case is…well, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s just a matter of historical chance. There just weren’t that many feasible alternatives to England’s first truly recognized queen Mary Tudor whereas in France Jeanne still had two adult uncles. Or maybe it’s something deeper than that. For our purposes, it’s enough to say that Catherine now found herself in a world that simultaneously barred women from ever sitting on the actual seat of power yet gave them ways to exercise power, either indirectly or quite literally in the name of a husband or son. Strange and paradoxical as this whole environment toward women and power was, Catherine would nonetheless thrive in it.
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