France
Philip IV (1285-1314)
Philip was one of the great medieval French kings. He was called Philip the Fair not because he was just but because he was good-looking. "The handsomest man in the world, who could do nothing but stare speechless at people," or so said one chronicler, earning him another nickname: King Owl.
He was quite fearless politically, however, and two of the acts of his reign serve to signal a significant change in the character of medieval life. The first of these was his conflict with the papacy; the second was the dissolution of the Templars.
Philip came into repeated conflict with one pope in particular: Boniface VIII. The quarrel was overtly over who had the right to tax the French clergy, but underneath that was a fundamental disagreement over the relative rights of kings and popes. This was an old conflict, one of the characteristic quarrels of the High Middle Ages, but Philip gave it a new twist, and in so doing created a crisis within the Church. How the popes came to Avignon is related in a separate lecture, so I won't repeat that material here. It's worth emphasizing, though, that one result of the removal of the papacy to Avignon was that the French monarchs exercised uncontested control over the French clergy for over a century.