Marrying heiresses in the reign of Philippe Auguste: aristocratic marital strategy in the counties of Nevers, Auxerre and Tonnerre

Abstract

I

In a letter to the bishop of Auxerre in 1224, Pope Honorius III recounted the tumultuous events of a familial dispute in northern Burgundy.¹ Honorius had overseen several enquêtes instigated by the family of Pierre II de Courtenay. In the latest instalment, the pope lamented the actions of Pierre’s daughter Mathilde, countess of Nevers, heiress to the three counties of Nevers, Auxerre and Tonnerre. He accused Mathilde of unfairly withholding the counties of Auxerre and Tonnerre from her half-brother, Philippe de Namur. Mathilde’s husband, Hervé de Donzy, had ravaged Philippe’s lands, leaving him destitute and unable to pay his debts. Mathilde, now a widow, continued to hold her brother’s lands ‘undeservedly’ (indebite). Four years earlier, Mathilde and her husband had also written to Honorius III, complaining that Mathilde’s brother and uncle, along with the bishop of Auxerre, were unfairly withholding key fiefs and castles from the inheritance of Mathilde’s daughter, Agnès.² As this article will explore, both sides of the family navigated this dispute by prioritizing the manipulation of secular and ecclesiastical customs and traditions surrounding marriage and inheritance.

This narrative of Countess Mathilde and her husband reacting to local circumstances by pursuing their own marital and inheritance strategies does not match scholarship on aristocratic families who experienced female inheritance during the reign of Philippe Auguste (r. 1180–1223). Alongside his governmental reform and territorial expansion, Philippe Auguste is credited as one of the first Capetian kings to make control of marriage, particularly those of heiresses, an instrument of the realm.³ Changing inheritance practices and the high mortality rates of aristocratic men during the twelfth century both contributed to a number of important heiresses, most famously Eleanor of Aquitaine, inheriting large and strategic territories.⁴ The counties of Flanders, Boulogne, Nevers, Ponthieu and Bourbon all saw more than one successive inheriting countess. In his seminal work on Philippe Auguste’s reign, John Baldwin painted a linear picture of increasing royal control, arguing that by 1193, the king exercised complete control over the marriages of heiresses.⁵ Owing to the large territories that the heiresses brought in marriage, and the potential power blocs they could form with prospective partners, royal control over their marriages is seen as a key tool for the expansion and consolidation of the Capetian realm.

How this increasing royal control worked in practice, and how it affected aristocratic prerogatives concerning marriage, is unclear. Aristocratic families have typically been attributed with little agency in the decisions concerning the marriages of heiresses, and the heiresses themselves even less so. Yet, as outlined above, marital and inheritance strategies played an essential role in the way the Nevers family navigated the intrafamilial inheritance dispute. There is a wealth of work on aristocratic marital strategy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, all highlighting the utmost political importance of the associated exchanges of property, resources and alliances. To what extent, then, did royal control limit the way in which aristocratic heiresses and their families could engage with such decisions of high political importance?

The comital family of Nevers experienced female inheritance for nearly a century, from 1180 to 1279. For Baldwin, the comital family of Nevers offered Philippe Auguste ‘the most repeated opportunities’ for royal control during his reign. The family’s inheriting countesses married four times during the reign of Philippe Auguste, and Baldwin characterized all of their marriages as tightly controlled, adding that the Nevers heiresses were married ‘in practice as well as in theory’ with royal approval.⁶

This narrative of royal control of the marriages of heiresses focuses on surviving royal documents that record evidence of the family paying heavy reliefs, pledging their loyalty to the king and promising not to arrange marriages without royal consent.⁷ These documents, most often issued from the royal chancery, are the epitome of what we associate with royal control of marriage, implying the choice of partner was entirely up to the king. They paint a picture of sustained and systematic royal control over the families of heiresses and their marriages.

These documents were not, however, the only documents produced in association with the Nevers marriages. Although the family pledged to not marry the heiresses without the king’s consent, documents kept locally show the family manipulated the marital assigns and inheritance associated with their marriages to negotiate the intrafamilial dispute. The archives of the comital family of Nevers were mostly destroyed in a fire in 1793. Fortunately, the Abbé Marolles had catalogued some 19,000 documents from the collections during the previous century.⁸ His inventories are now held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF).⁹ Evidence from aristocratic and ecclesiastical archives within local, aristocratic contexts demonstrate multiple levels of control over aristocratic marriage. Although royal documents record royal control at a high level, marriage was also an integral part of the strategy for both sides of the family, who used dowers, dowries, inheritance portions and succession strategies to secure their hold on the disputed lands, drawing on local connections with religious institutions and ecclesiastical networks to consolidate those gifts. The family also utilized the Church’s rules on marriage: in addition to the inheritance enquiries that Mathilde and her husband brought to the pope, Mathilde’s uncle Robert de Courtenay may have used claims of consanguinity in his favour, in an attempt to disinherit her daughter, Agnès.

Analysis of the dispute between Mathilde and her half-siblings demonstrates the important roles that each family member played in decisions over marriage, and the autonomous decisions they were able to make regarding their marriages and succession strategies. Given the multiple layers of control and flexibility that the marital documentation demonstrates, this article will problematize the importance that scholarship has placed on Philippe Auguste’s domination of heiresses and their families. It reassesses royal and aristocratic prerogatives in this important arena, supporting recent work that emphasizes aristocratic cooperation and negotiation in the expansion and formalization of Capetian royal power, rather than conflict and repression.¹⁰

II

The comital family of Nevers held significant lands in northern Burgundy, including the three counties of Nevers, Auxerre and Tonnerre. Whilst these counties did not rival principalities like Champagne or Burgundy in size, they played an undeniably central role in the Capetian realm.¹¹ The county of Nevers lay at the intersection of the duchy of Burgundy, the county of Champagne and the royal domain, making it an area of key interest for the Capetian kings. The family’s lands also formed an integral part of a trading network, linking England, northern France and Germany with Italy and the Mediterranean.¹² The family were important crusaders and frequently married into the aristocratic and royal families of Capetian France.¹³

The comital family of Nevers acquired the county of Auxerre in the early eleventh century, although exactly when and why they received the county is debated.¹⁴ The third county, Tonnerre, came to the family through marriage, and subsequent generations tended to use the county as a dower gift or an inheritance portion for younger sons.¹⁵ A series of crusading deaths in the family led to Gui de Nevers’ possession of all three counties. After his death in 1175 and the death of his son Guillaume in 1181, both the counties of Nevers and Auxerre passed to Gui’s daughter, Agnès. Tonnerre, the third county, passed to Agnès after her mother’s death. From that moment on, the three counties were inherited as a unit, by women, until the Parlement de Paris ruled the counties should be divided between three inheriting sisters in 1273.

After her brother’s death in 1181, Agnès de Nevers entered the wardship of Philippe Auguste. In 1184, the king oversaw her marriage to Pierre II de Courtenay, his cousin. Pierre was the eldest son of Pierre I de Courtenay, the youngest brother of King Louis VI. Pierre II’s mother, Elisabeth de Courtenay, was an important heiress in northern Burgundy and southern Champagne.¹⁶ After handing the castle of Montargis to the king as a relief payment, Pierre’s marriage brought him control of Agnès’ three counties of Nevers, Auxerre and Tonnerre, that neighboured his maternal inheritance.

Pierre II de Courtenay became a key player on the stage of Capetian politics. He accompanied Philippe Auguste on crusade in 1190, fought by his side at the Battle of Bouvines (27 July 1214), and joined his brother, Robert de Courtenay, in the Albigensian Crusade; Robert was also well connected as butler of France.¹⁷ Through his second wife, Yolande de Hainaut, Count Pierre was named emperor of the Latin Empire of Constantinople, and he died trying to claim the title in 1219.¹⁸ His identity as a royal cousin did not, however, signal the beginning of sustained royal intervention in the three counties.

From the outset, Pierre II began a programme of buying or seizing key territories traditionally held by the comital family of Nevers; these lands featured centrally in the later intrafamilial dispute.¹⁹ The close proximity of Pierre’s maternal lands and his rapidly growing property portfolio in Auxerre established him as a key player in northern Burgundy. Ample evidence survives of Pierre and Agnès working both together and independently of each other to govern the three counties, but her early death in 1192 prevents us from knowing how her leadership with Pierre would have developed thereafter.²⁰

The couple’s only child, Mathilde, would eventually hold the three counties for the remainder of Philippe Auguste’s reign and beyond, until 1257. Pierre II held all three counties in wardship for Mathilde after Agnès’ death and remarried within a year. Philippe Auguste confirmed a double marriage contract between Pierre II and Count Baudouin VIII of Flanders, who controlled several territories within the empire, outside the control of the king of France. Pierre II was set to marry Baudouin VIII’s daughter Yolande, and when she came of age, Mathilde would marry Baudouin VIII’s son Philippe.²¹ The match worked for all parties and eased tensions between the king and Baudouin VIII, who had both assembled forces against each other the previous year.²² In the marriage contract, Pierre II was able to negotiate possession of his daughter Mathilde’s inheritance for his lifetime; the marriage contract stipulated that the counties of Nevers and Auxerre would not pass to Mathilde and her husband until after Pierre II’s death. The marriages were also advantageous for the king as they would ensure that Baudouin’s heir would become his direct vassal for Mathilde’s lands.²³

Pierre II married Yolande the same year. Their children, particularly their son Philippe, were central to the later intrafamilial dispute considered in this article. Pierre II, Yolande and their sons attempted to keep control of many of the comital holdings that Pierre II had begun collecting during his marriage to Agnès, focusing mainly on Bétry, Coulanges-sur-Yonne and Mailly, key territories for control of the county of Auxerre.²⁴ However, the second marriage of the double contract, between Mathilde and Baudouin VIII’s son Philippe, never took place. Baudouin VIII rebelled against Philippe Auguste and allied with Richard I, king of England; a marriage between Mathilde, heiress to the three counties, and the heir to Namur would have seemed less appealing to Mathilde’s father and the king of France after the rebellion. We do not know whether the refusal to go ahead with the second marriage came from Philippe Auguste or his cousin, Pierre. Baudouin IX, the eldest son of Baudouin VIII, wrote to Pope Innocent III, complaining that Count Pierre was refusing to allow Mathilde to marry Philippe de Namur. Innocent wrote to the archbishops and bishops named in the original marriage contract, and to the king, to compel Pierre II de Courtenay to fulfil the contract’s terms.²⁵ Papal involvement in the family’s marriages was common, and often a route of choice for the family, especially when bishops were overlords of implicated lands or guarantors of the contracts. Events over the following year removed control of Mathilde’s marriage from all of the implicated parties. Pierre II de Courtenay clashed with one of his vassals, Hervé of Donzy, over their respective rights to the castle of Gien. The anonymous chronicle of Nevers claims Hervé resorted to martial action and captured Pierre II in battle, holding him hostage.²⁶

After capturing Count Pierre, Hervé travelled to Paris to see Philippe Auguste immediately. Pierre II was in a vulnerable position. He was only the guardian of the counties of Nevers, Auxerre and Tonnerre on behalf of his daughter, Mathilde, and the prisoner of his vassal, Hervé. In the ensuing negotiations, undoubtedly overseen by the king, Pierre II lost Nevers, the most prized of the three counties, and was left with wardship of Auxerre and Tonnerre for his lifetime. Hervé left Paris with a much better prize: a betrothal to the heiress Mathilde, and, as a result, the county of Nevers. Hervé de Donzy was from a baronial family with lands neighbouring Nevers and Auxerre.²⁷ If Philippe Auguste approved the marriage between Hervé de Donzy and Mathilde de Courtenay hoping that Hervé would prove loyal to the crown, he was bitterly disappointed. Although Hervé initially proved loyal to the king in his rivalry with King John of England in 1203, he changed tactics ten years later in the prelude to the famous Battle of Bouvines between the Capetian and the Imperial–Flamo–Angevin coalition.²⁸ Hervé was named as a major player in the anti-Capetian coalition by Guillaume Le Breton, a contemporary chronicler and chaplain of Philippe Auguste.²⁹ Guillaume described a treaty between Hervé and King John, sealed by a proposed marriage between one of King John’s sons and Agnès, Hervé’s and Mathilde’s only surviving child and heir.³⁰Although Hervé does not appear to have been present at Bouvines, his alliance and marriage treaty with King John was clearly a threat and an act of open rebellion against Philippe Auguste.³¹

After Hervé’s betrayal and the huge loss experienced by the anti-Capetian coalition, the count of Nevers was summoned to the king’s court where he swore an oath not to give Agnès in marriage without royal consent.³² This time, the king took no chances, and attempted to secure the count’s loyalty and lands by betrothing Agnès to Philippe, the king’s grandson and future heir to the French throne. The proposed marriage would have tied the comital family of Nevers and their northern Burgundian inheritance to the French Crown permanently. Remarkably, Hervé was not punished by the confiscation of his lands, and the marriage contract between Agnès and Philippe allowed any future children by Hervé and Mathilde to keep the county of Nevers.³³

Even the marriage of the eventual heir into the French royal dynasty could not permanently link the Crown’s interests to the three counties. The young royal heir, Philippe, died in 1219, and Mathilde and Hervé returned home early from crusade in Egypt. Agnès was likely still residing at the French court when her parents returned, and Hervé went to the king’s court immediately to renew his oath that he would not arrange Agnès’ marriage without royal consent.³⁴ Hervé and Mathilde also returned to northern Burgundy to find Mathilde’s uncle, Robert de Courtenay, and half-brother, Philippe de Namur, governing Auxerre and Tonnerre on behalf of their father, Pierre II de Courtenay.

In 1216, ahead of his departure to claim the title of emperor of Constantinople, Pierre II had left the counties of Auxerre and Tonnerre in the hands of his eldest son Philippe de Namur and his second son, Robert de Courtenay. He also placed his lands in Auxerre under the protection of the bishop of Auxerre, Guillaume de Seignelay, who left Auxerre shortly afterwards in 1219 to take the seat of the bishop of Paris.³⁵ Unfortunately for Pierre II, he was captured on the way to Constantinople. He died in the prison of the despot of Epirus in 1219; the exact date of his death is undocumented. Pierre’s eldest son Philippe was named as his successor, but he declined the imperial role. In his stead, Philippe’s brother Robert de Courtenay, left France in the late summer of the following year to claim the title.³⁶ Whilst Pierre’s death was unconfirmed in France for years afterwards, rumours of his death began to circulate in France from the beginning of 1219.³⁷ The uncertainty around his death was used by both Pierre’s brother Robert and his son Philippe to justify their actions in the ensuing familial dispute; Philippe de Namur continued to claim he had rights over the county owing to the uncertainty of his father’s death.³⁸ What followed was a bitter intrafamilial dispute over the two counties. Both parties engaged in a multitude of tactics to secure their hold, many of which focused on marital assigns and control of Mailly, Bétry and Coulanges-sur-Yonne in Auxerre.

Both a papal letter and the gestes of the bishops of Auxerre blamed the beginning of the dispute on Hervé, count of Nevers, claiming Hervé took advantage of Bishop Guillaume’s absence to raise an army and take Auxerre by force.³⁹ Honorius III wrote to Hervé, chastizing his actions, threatening excommunication, and demanding that Philippe Auguste compel the count to withdraw.⁴⁰ Mathilde, Hervé and their daughter Agnès also appealed to the pope for support, claiming they were certain of Pierre’s death and that the town of Auxerre and their inheritance was being held wrongfully by Mathilde’s half-brother and uncle.⁴¹

When Agnès married Gui de Châtillon in 1221, the marriage took place in the midst of this familial dispute. Gui was from an important aristocratic family in its own right and held lands in the same trading corridor as the comital family of Nevers. Gui’s mother, Elisabeth of Saint-Pol, was the elder daughter and principal heir of Hugues IV, count of Saint-Pol, by Yolande of Hainault, who was the daughter of Baudouin IV of Hainault and Alix de Namur, and consequently a sister of Baudouin VIII of Flanders. Gui’s father, Gaucher de Châtillon, was a second cousin of Philippe Auguste, held important offices in Burgundy and Champagne and was a prominent figure in both regional and national politics. The family was therefore well connected to the upper French aristocracy. They were also considered to be amongst Philippe Auguste’s most loyal supporters.⁴² As a result, this marriage has been seen in the same context of royal control as the other marriages of Nevers heiresses during this reign, as a way for Philippe Auguste to extend Capetian influence into the counties by marrying the heiress to a loyal supporter of the Crown.⁴³

Without surviving narrative evidence, it is difficult to unpick exactly what marrying with royal consent or approval entailed, and the extent to which the family and the king had agency over the choice of spouse. As demonstrated with the previous marriages of heiresses, the match could be seen to work for all parties. Such a union was undoubtedly made with royal consent; surviving charters attest to Hervé’s oaths to Philippe Auguste. Marriage was also a key opportunity for the king to implement further control over his aristocracy. Gui and his brother Hugues paid the king a relief in the form of the lordship of Pont-Saint-Maxence.⁴⁴ Gui also swore two oaths of fidelity to the king in the presence of many important barons and churchmen, all of whom pledged heavy sureties should Gui break his oath.⁴⁵ The sureties equalled the substantial sum of 6,500 marks, the equivalent of 13,000 livres parisis (lp) at the time.⁴⁶ Gui was also required to ensure that all of the barons and knights of the county of Nevers swore to abide by the king, should Gui break his vow. These oaths are often cited as key evidence for complete royal control over the marriages of heiresses.

But at the same time, the marriage also worked for the two aristocratic families. The marriage was a continuation of a longstanding Nevers familial tradition to select partners from neighbouring regions. When Gui and Agnès married, Gui was unable to take control of his inheritance in Saint-Pol, that his mother, Elisabeth Candavène, still held as the heiress. Gui benefited from royal favour and support in his negotiations with his mother; the king used Elisabeth’s debts as leverage to secure Gui’s control in Saint-Pol from 1223.⁴⁷ Indeed, when seen in the context of the Nevers family’s own concurrent inheritance dispute, the decision to marry into a family that was benefiting from royal support may have been a conscious decision.

A wider study of royal and aristocratic prerogatives concerning choice of partner is needed. The royal chancery documents and the king’s approval, or at least presence, at negotiations for the family’s marriage have been seen as enough to imply royal control. However, there is also a wealth of other documentation, often originally kept locally, that points towards a more reactive and flexible use of marriage and marital assigns for the family and heiresses. The following sections will consider points at which the family was able to use the same marriages as integral parts of its own strategy to deal with the inheritance dispute.

III

Property and inheritance were intrinsically linked to the terms of each marriage. Dower, dowry and matters of succession and inheritance were all considered when arranging the marriages of heiresses. During the reign of Philippe Auguste, marriage gifts and inheritance practices were still intensely regionalized matters, the terms of which were dictated by local customs and traditions; the slow move from ‘custom’ to ‘law’ only began to take hold in France in the late thirteenth century.⁴⁸ Different regions had different customs and traditions concerning how parents would divide their children’s inheritance, what percentage of the husband’s possessions would be given in dower and rights of wardship and succession, making such considerations central to marital strategy. These customs were increasingly documented in customaries, that recorded each region’s local customs and were written by authors with varying experience of Roman and canon law.⁴⁹ Although customs were often mentioned in marriage contracts, there were also opportunities for negotiation and familial traditions. Georges Duby’s seminal theory that the aristocracy increasingly followed a model of primogeniture and patrilineal inheritance now rests on ‘untenable assumptions’.⁵⁰ Amy Livingstone has found evidence of families following patterns of both primogeniture and collective inheritance in the regions of the middle Loire.⁵¹ Theodore Evergates found a preference for partible inheritance amongst aristocratic families in Champagne.⁵²

These variations necessitated clear agreement between parties on how property would be exchanged and how lands would be inherited for each marriage. Surviving marriage contracts and documents modifying their terms furnish such details, including marital assigns such as dower and dowry, and meticulously planned inheritance and succession strategies if the shape of the family changed before the marriage, and sometimes after. Several marriage contracts negotiated by the comital family of Nevers were originally kept in their household accounts, or in other aristocratic archives linked to the family. A study of the marriages of the comital family of Nevers shows that each generation followed slightly different inheritance solutions depending on its circumstances and generational considerations.⁵³

This flexibility and ability to react to local concerns is clear in the bitter inheritance dispute between the comital family of Nevers and the second family of Pierre II de Courtenay. One important way in which the aristocracy were able to use transfer of property as a political tool was through the assignment of dower, the gift from the groom’s family to the bride, promised at the point of marriage but intended for her widowhood. Scholarship assessing dower has seen considerable reinterpretation in recent years, particularly surrounding the extent of the control that the bride could exercise over her dower during her marriage.⁵⁴ Recent scholarship has also highlighted the extent to which dower could be a political tool.⁵⁵ Since dower was an impermanent alienation, dower lands were often assigned strategically. That contested, and sometimes vulnerable, lands could be deliberately placed in the control of a dowager countess implies a great deal of political responsibility for noblewomen in relation to their dower lands.

Pierre II de Courtenay and his wife Yolande attempted to use to dower to secure the contested territories. Pierre had been granted the rights to Auxerre and Tonnerre for his lifetime in 1199, but the counties were to return to Mathilde on her father’s death. As noted above, Pierre had established Bétry, Mailly and Coulanges-sur-Yonne as key for control of Auxerre, and based his administration of the county around them. Before Pierre II left to claim the title of emperor of Constantinople in 1216, he assigned these three places to his wife Yolande in dower. When Pierre had married Yolande in 1193, the contract, approved by Philippe Auguste, had not specified what lands he would assign for her dower. The contract merely stated that Pierre would assign half of all the lands he held by hereditary right, and half of all that he would acquire in the future.⁵⁶ This type of clause was not unusual and was used by the family in several other marriage contracts. Even when dower lands were detailed in documentation, those lands were changeable: Mathilde, countess of Nevers, exchanged parts of her own dower with her son-in-law in 1236.⁵⁷ Keeping that flexibility allowed the family to use dower pragmatically, often without the need for royal consent.

Pierre must have been aware that his and Yolande’s departure in 1216 could leave Auxerre open to a dispute between his children. The first evidence of the couple using dower to protect Pierre’s hold on Auxerre comes from the accounts of the bishop of Auxerre. In 1216, before she accompanied her husband, Yolande requested that the bishop recognize her as his femina for her dower lands: Mailly, Bétry and Coulanges-sur-Yonne.⁵⁸ This was a calculated political move. Assigning those key lands to his wife in dower and having them confirmed by the bishop ensured that Pierre II could secure those lands and his hold of the county before his departure. Their status as dower lands protected them from alienations and allowed Yolande to place them in both her son’s and the bishop’s protection whilst she joined Pierre.

Mathilde, Hervé and Agnès reacted to this gift with their own strategy shortly after their return from crusade. Scholarship has tended to view dowry as a ‘premortem assign’ for daughters, for whom a dowry represented their entire claim to any inheritance.⁵⁹ However, this was not the case for heiresses, who would eventually inherit their parents’ patrimony in addition to any marital assigns. Evidence from the comital family’s wider kin shows daughters receiving inheritance portions before and after their marriages. Agnès’ own daughter Yolande was assigned both an inheritance portion and a dowry, as well as further shares of her brother’s inheritance when he came of age, and her grandmother’s inheritance after her death.⁶⁰ Later marriage contracts for the family also distinguished between all three types of gift.

The copy of a now lost charter confirmed Agnès’ dowry in her marriage to Gui: the four castles of Germigny, Saint-Saulge, Cuffy and Les-Roches-sur-Allier.⁶¹ All four castles were situated in close proximity to Nevers. Agnès’ dowry also encompassed her father’s five baronies in Perche-Gouet, the same dowry promised in her betrothal to Philippe Auguste’s grandson Philippe.⁶² In addition, before Agnès’ marriage and the assignment of her dowry, Hervé and Mathilde may have assigned Mailly and Bétry, the disputed castles, to her as an inheritance gift. Evidence for this gift comes from two letters that Hervé wrote to the pope on behalf of Agnès shortly after Yolande’s death, complaining that the bishop of Auxerre had wrongfully assigned Mailly and Bétry to Agnès’ uncle, Philippe de Namur. Moreover, Hervé highlighted, Philippe was occupying the castles of Mailly, Bétry and Coulanges-sur-Yonne, known to belong to his daughter by right.⁶³ Hervé claimed Philippe had wrongfully seized those lands and committed many other injuries against Agnès, and supplicated the pope to support Agnès in claiming what was hers by right.

The Courtenays continued to use marital assigns as a tool to secure the lands even two decades later. After both Philippe de Namur and Robert de Courtenay had died in 1239, Baudouin de Courtenay, their younger brother, assigned the same lands of Mailly, Bétry and Coulanges-sur-Yonne to his wife, Marie de Brienne, in addition to the dower that he had already promised.⁶⁴ He stressed that the new additions to his wife’s dower should be assigned to her straight away, implying that he was again using the strategy of assigning dower to protect family lands from other claimants. It is difficult to ascertain what luck Marie had in claiming those lands; Mathilde, countess of Nevers, had certainly regained control of all three counties by her death in 1257, and most likely much earlier.⁶⁵

IV

Aside from a clear ability to react to local circumstances by assigning property tactically, both sides of the family appealed to ecclesiastical networks to secure their support. The use of such networks and tactics are vital context in which Agnès’ marriage to Gui de Châtillon should be viewed.

Bétry and Mailly, central to the intrafamilial dispute, were the cause of centuries of difficulty between the comital family of Nevers and the bishops of Auxerre over associated rights of lordship. Despite the comital family recognizing that it held both Mailly and Bétry in fief from the bishop of Auxerre, it was in constant conflict with its landlord, the bishop.⁶⁶ The bishops imposed long interdicts on the counts and frequently excommunicated them in response to their hostile actions.⁶⁷ Pierre II had attempted to consolidate the way that he held the lands in 1210, refusing to pay homage to the bishop of Auxerre for Mailly on the grounds that he held the land from the countess of Champagne instead.⁶⁸ When it came to securing his family’s inheritance, however, Pierre recognized the importance of the bishop’s influence and authority. Their interactions during the first years of the familial inheritance dispute reinforce current scholarship emphasizing the complex, multiple identities occupied by churchmen. The Church was not a static, homogenized institution, and its bishops, most of whom were recruited from the aristocracy, had their own fluctuating motivations and ambitions.⁶⁹

Pierre II de Courtenay employed several tactics to ensure episcopal support and protection of his lands before he left to claim the imperial title. The count conferred overlordship and certain privileges to territories previously outside the bishop’s control in return for episcopal recognition of Pierre’s hereditary claims to the disputed lands. Although the bishops already had documents attesting to their overlordship of Mailly and Bétry, they did not have recognized overlordship of Coulanges-sur-Yonne from Pierre II until 1215.⁷⁰ Yolande’s request that the bishop accept her as his femina for the fief the following year, before she departed with Pierre II, further gave the bishop that formal recognition.⁷¹

Alongside comital recognition of the bishop’s overlordship, the bishop also confirmed Pierre’s sale of the rights to the town of Auxerre to merchants for six years ahead of his departure. Within the confirmation, Pierre again acknowledged that Mailly, Bétry and Coulanges-sur-Yonne were held from the bishop, which had been placed under episcopal protection as Yolande’s dower.⁷² As discussed above, assigning Bétry, Mailly and Coulanges-sur-Yonne in dower to his wife and entrusting those lands to the care of the bishop was an astute political move that ensured that Pierre’s sons had the bishop’s support after his death. Indeed, before the bishop’s departure, a fragment of a charter shows Philippe de Namur, his uncle and the bishop working together to manage Pierre’s debts in his absence.⁷³

In addition to this practical support, Pierre II may have taken extraordinary measures to prevent the lands he was holding in wardship from passing to his daughter, Mathilde. Pierre II and Yolande requested that their son Philippe held the lands during their impending absence, naming Philippe as ‘count of Nevers’. This designation is extraordinary as Philippe had no claim to that county; nor did Philippe’s father at the time the charter was issued. The title could have been a scribal error, although this seems unlikely considering how local and well known the three counties would have been to the scribe. When read in the context of the inheritance dispute and the measures that Pierre II and his children took to hold on to Auxerre, naming Philippe as count of Nevers in a charter confirmed by the bishop of Auxerre could be seen as an attempt to assert legitimacy in the county, a direct threat to Mathilde, Hervé and their daughter Agnès.

Both Mathilde and Pierre II de Courtenay also engaged in religious patronage with institutions that held lands close to the contested inheritance. In 1216, Pierre II gifted exemptions to the abbot and monks of Reigny, an abbey downriver from Bétry.⁷⁴ In his charter, he explicitly specified that any of his officers at Bétry, Mailly or Coulanges-sur-Yonne would swear to the conditions of the gift, too.

V

Within the strategic use of property assigns and religious patronage, the intra-familial conflict was complicated further by Mathilde’s uncle, Robert de Courtenay. Immediately after his great-niece’s marriage to Gui de Châtillon, Robert initiated an enquiry into the consanguineous nature of the marriage: Agnès and Gui shared a common great-great-grandfather, King Louis VI. In fact, they were related in the same degree as Agnès was to her first husband, Philippe, the grandson of Philippe Auguste.

When analysing the relationship between the aristocracy and the Church’s rules on consanguinity in the twelfth century, Sara McDougall identified a ‘kind of complicated compliance’.⁷⁵ The aristocracy understood the rules but were able to use them to their own advantage, too, since a consanguineous marriage could be dissolved easily in unknown future circumstances. On the other hand, alerting the Church to a marriage within the forbidden degrees could sometimes be fruitful for rivals who wished to dissolve a disadvantageous marriage. In line with Innocent III’s aims for marriage reform, the Fourth Lateran Council reduced the degrees of consanguinity from seven to four in 1215. The intention was to reduce the number of marriages made knowingly within the forbidden degrees with an easy get-out clause.⁷⁶ Increasingly, the family’s marriage contracts included clauses that made the marriages dependent on papal permission.⁷⁷

Reform was not immediate; churchmen enjoyed the same sort of ‘complicated compliance’ with the rules as the aristocracy, and bishops were named as guarantors for terms relating to the consanguineous marriage.⁷⁸ What is surprising concerning Robert de Courtenay’s initiation of the complaint is the role he played in the marriage beforehand. Robert knew about the marriage from its conception and was named as a key guarantor for Gui de Châtillon’s oath of fidelity to the king.⁷⁹ Despite Robert’s presence in the documentation associated with the marriage, he must have alerted the pope to their consanguinity almost immediately after it took place.

Robert’s actions have been preserved in a set of letters between Honorius III, local bishops and the comital family. Although some of the letters are now lost, their contents can be derived from references in later letters. The pope sent Agnès and Gui de Châtillon two letters. The first warned the couple of their consanguineous marriage and ordered them to dissolve their union.⁸⁰ Seeing that his orders had been ignored, the pope wrote a second letter, chastizing the couple for knowingly ignoring his letter and ordering that their union be dissolved immediately.⁸¹ The consequences of ignoring this second letter were made explicit: the couple would be excommunicated, their children would be made illegitimate and, crucially for Robert and his nephew Philippe, their inheritance forbidden.

The pope utilized a network of bishops in the local Champagne region to investigate Robert’s claims but we do not know how Agnès and Gui responded. Gui’s chancellor had recognized that the couple were related within the forbidden degrees but Agnès and Gui’s children were not disinherited.⁸² The deaths of Agnès, Gui and Honorius III between 1226 and 1228 may have stalled and eventually put an end to the enquiries.

VI

Marriage and its associated exchange of property were essential to the way that all family members navigated the intrafamilial inheritance dispute during the latter half of Philippe Auguste’s rule. Both sides of the family recognized the protected status that marital gifts bestowed on lands and property. Yolande and her daughter-in-law Agnès were both assigned Coulanges-sur-Yonne, Mailly and Bétry, the essential yet contested lands. Owing to its dual status as a protected yet impermanent alienation, dower was a key tool for Pierre II and Yolande to protect their hold on the key administrative territories of Auxerre before their departure. In response, Countess Mathilde and Hervé assigned the same lands as an inheritance gift to their daughter, in addition to her dowry. Although the king was present during the negotiations for the marriage of Pierre II de Courtenay and Yolande in 1193, they were able to determine the terms and lands associated with Yolande’s dower twenty years later, in a reaction to changing circumstances. In response, Countess Mathilde and Hervé’s assignment of the same lands to Agnès as inheritance, in addition to her agreed dowry, demonstrates an ability to act flexibly and pragmatically. Both women were essential to their family’s strategy; assigning the lands as dower and inheritance gifts was intended to bind Agnès and Yolande, and their family’s control, to the lands for their lifetimes.

In the case of Gui’s marriage to Agnès, a high-profile heiress, royal involvement (or at least approval) did not preclude their marriage featuring centrally in the comital family of Nevers’ own familial strategy. Clearly, the family was not excluded from engaging in key decisions about property and inheritance associated with marriage. Aristocratic property was still subject to local, complex landholding situations and the family was able to draw on its networks to secure its hold on the contested lands. When the bishop of Auxerre withheld lands, Mathilde and her husband chose to appeal to the pope for support. Robert de Courtenay explored other avenues to navigate the dispute, appealing to the pope with claims of consanguinity and calling for his great-niece’s complete disinheritance. The family also engaged in local patronage to protect its strategic plays for control by assigning gifts to religious institutions that depended on its hold of the disputed lands.

These strategies all placed central importance on ecclesiastical and secular rules concerning marriage, and problematize current narratives concerning royal control of aristocratic heiresses and their marriages. Royal manipulation of aristocratic marriage, particularly the marriages of heiresses, has been seen as a key tool of power for Philippe Auguste. This royal control is portrayed as absolute, with great consequences for the expansion of Capetian power and territory. The marriages of heiresses are placed within a context of the king rewarding loyal families and ‘guiding family destinies’ to spread royal influence.⁸³ As a consequence, the comital family of Nevers has been given little agency in the decisions concerning their marriages. Certainly, the oaths and sureties associated with Gui and Agnès’ marriage demonstrate the king’s involvement, and at least approval, of the marriage. The documents also demonstrate some of the ways aristocratic marriage was intrinsically linked to royal control. They provided an opportunity for Philippe Auguste to confirm his authority and secure loyalty from his aristocracy. In addition, the relief payments associated with the marriage extended the king’s strategy of acquiring key castles and territories along trading routes in southern Champagne and northern Burgundy.

Yet, although Agnès was one of a string of inheriting countesses whose marriages were approved by the king, her marriage and the associated property were not precluded from the family’s own strategy. Documents from aristocratic and ecclesiastic archives demonstrate that the family was able to use the lands associated with the marriage to lead its own strategy and react to local circumstances. In addition, although the marriage had the king’s approval, the match worked for both families. On many levels, Agnès and Gui’s marriage was an extension of the comital family of Nevers’ long tradition of marrying into neighbouring lordly families within the same eastern French trading corridor. Indeed, when set within the context of the intrafamilial dispute, the marriage of Agnès of Nevers to Gui de Châtillon could be seen as a conscious move to gain support from an important local landholder, as well as from the Crown, rather than a passive act forced upon the family.

An in-depth study of royal and aristocratic prerogatives concerning marriage is clearly needed.⁸⁴ In the case of the comital family of Nevers, there were multiple, competing levels of control at play. The motivations and preoccupations of both the family and the king cannot be placed in a binary model that assumes no agency on the part of the comital family and complete control from the Crown. As demonstrated by recent scholarship that underlines a more cooperative and nuanced relationship, the ways in which the family navigated the dispute reveals an ability to use marriage and inheritance to respond flexibly and pragmatically to changing local circumstances. Having an heiress in the family did not exclude the aristocracy from making autonomous decisions about their inheritance and succession. Given the importance attributed to the king’s control of heiresses, a reassessment of how these heiresses and their families were able to embed aristocratic marriage within their own strategies would make an important contribution to our understanding of the role of the aristocracy in the development and expansion of the Capetian realm during the reign of Philippe Auguste.

Footnotes

Author notes