Louis VI

Louis VI (born 1081—died August 1, 1137) was the king of France from 1108 to 1137; he brought power and dignity to the French crown by his recovery of royal authority over the independent nobles in his domains of the Île-de-France and the Orléanais.

Louis was designated by his father, Philip I, as his successor in 1098 and was already effectively the ruler well before Philip’s death in 1108. He quickly recognized that his priority must be to bring the unruly barons of the royal lands under firm control, and he spent much of his reign in conflict with such men as Hugh de Puiset. His success won him the respect of his greater vassals and was crucial to later Capetian expansion. From his pacification program Louis developed several important concepts for future kings: for example, that the king was a vassal of no man.

Louis usually had a good relationship with the church and clergy. He has been presented by some historians as the father of communes, or towns, but in fact he recognized towns only out of circumstance rather than from principle.

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Louis’s major wars were against King Henry I of England during the periods 1104–13 and 1116–20. When Charles the Good, count of Flanders, was assassinated in 1127, Louis supported William Clito, who became the successor; even though William was eventually toppled, Louis’s actions demonstrated the new strength of the monarchy. In 1124 he was able to muster forces from many parts of France to counter a threatened invasion by the Holy Roman emperor Henry V, identifying himself as the vassal of St. Denis, the patron saint of France, whose banner he carried. Louis’s last major achievement was to arrange a marriage between his son Louis VII and Eleanor, heiress of William X, duke of Aquitaine.

An account of Louis’s reign written by Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis is informed by the fact that Suger was one of Louis’s most trusted advisers. It is also through Suger that the reason Louis has been called Louis the Fat (Louis le Gros) becomes clear: as a translation of Suger’s account by Jean Dunbabin describes the king during the 1120s, “His body was already heavy, weighed down by a mass of flesh; any other man, be he never so poor, subjected to such a dangerous corpulence, neither would nor could have ridden [to battle].” So too, with Louis near death, Suger described him as “worn out by his corpulence and by the continual strain of his tasks.”