Philip II of France married Ingeborg of Denmark in the summer of 1193 and rejected her before the wedding celebrations had even ended. When a courtier asked why the king wanted an annulment, Philip gave a strange answer: the marriage had not been consummated. Ingeborg insisted otherwise. The pope refused to dissolve the union.
Philip, furious, had his new queen locked away. She would spend the next twenty years as a prisoner of her own husband. Philip was born in Paris on August 21, 1165, the long-awaited son of King Louis VII and Adela of Champagne. Louis was already forty-five and in poor health when his first son was born.
Desperate to secure the succession, he had the fourteen-year-old Philip anointed king on November 1, 1179. By the following year, Louis was dead, and Philip ruled France alone. His first significant act as king was a break with his father’s policy. Louis had protected the Jews of France.
Philip did not. He confiscated their property and ordered them to convert to Christianity. In 1182, he expelled all Jews from the royal lands and burned the homes they had owned to make room for a new market in Paris. The worst violence came later, when nearly a hundred Jews were burned in the town of Brie-Comte-Robert.
Before taking the throne, Philip’s father had arranged a marriage meant to strengthen the kingdom. The bride was Isabella of Hainaut, the ten-year-old daughter of a powerful count. She brought with her the county of Artois, a large and valuable dowry. Philip’s mother opposed the match, as did several of his uncles, but the wedding took place anyway.
On May 28, 1180, Isabella became queen of France. By the time she was fourteen, Isabella had still not produced a son. Philip grew impatient. His anger sharpened during a war against Flanders, when Isabella’s father chose to support the enemy.
In Philip’s eyes, his wife had become a liability. He wanted her gone. Isabella, realizing she was about to be cast aside, put on the clothes of a penitent and walked barefoot to a church, hoping to win public sympathy. It worked.
A crowd gathered at the palace and demanded that the king keep his wife. Inside, Philip’s uncle Robert, who had opposed the marriage from the start, saw an opportunity. He joined the protest, knowing that if Isabella were cast aside, France would lose Artois. Philip was forced to back down.
Isabella saved her position in 1187, at the age of seventeen, when she gave birth to a son, Louis. Three years later, she gave birth to twins. The first boy died the day he was born. The next day, Isabella died from complications of the birth.
Two days later, the second twin also died. Philip, who was across the Channel fighting Richard I of England, signed a quick truce and hurried home. He made sure Isabella was buried properly, mourned for about a week, and returned at once to the war. Philip began searching for a second wife three years later.
He chose Ingeborg, a Danish princess, and her marriage came with a significant dowry of ten thousand marks. The wedding took place, but the king appeared pale and ill at ease from the start. As soon as the ceremony ended, he sent her to a convent and appealed to Pope Celestine III to annul the marriage. His stated reason was that the marriage had not been consummated.
Ingeborg, determined to keep her position, insisted it had been. The pope found Philip’s case weak and ruled that he could not marry anyone else because he already had a wife. Philip ignored the decision and arranged a new match with Margaret of Geneva, a thirteen-year-old noblewoman from Switzerland. Her father was escorting her to Paris when Thomas of Savoy attacked the party, seized Margaret, and married her himself.
The couple reportedly had fourteen children and lived happily ever after. Philip, meanwhile, imprisoned Ingeborg. In June 1196, he married Agnes of Méranie despite the pope’s clear objection. The pope condemned the union, warning that by taking a second wife while the first still lived, Philip was guilty of bigamy.
Philip refused to give Agnes up. In 1199, the pope placed the entire kingdom of France under an interdict, cutting the country off from the Church’s religious life. Ingeborg wrote to Philip describing harsh treatment and said she was considering ending her own life. He responded by moving her to a tower where she was given little food and no visitors.
Philip and Agnes had two children, whom the pope declared illegitimate, and then went further by excommunicating Philip himself. Disturbed by the sentence, the king promised to separate from Agnes. During that separation she became pregnant with a third child and died in childbirth. In 1201, calculated to serve his own political interests, the pope allowed Philip to have his children with Agnes declared legitimate.
That left Philip with one wife again, and he still wanted her gone. This time he told the pope that Ingeborg had used witchcraft to make marital relations impossible. Even the pope, who had already shown considerable flexibility, would not accept that claim. Philip was stuck with a wife he did not want.
He did, however, see the value of her Danish connections. Those ties, he believed, might open a path to the English throne. But first he needed the pope, and the pope needed him. A group in the south of France was living in a way that the Church considered heretical, and the pope asked Philip to bring them back into line by whatever force was necessary.
Philip remembered all the times the papacy had opposed him and refused. By now, the king’s interests had turned to building. He had the streets of Paris paved and built the great marketplace of Les Halles. He ensured the completion of Notre-Dame Cathedral, which had already been under construction when he took the throne, and oversaw the building of the Louvre, though in his day it was a fortress, not an art gallery.
He chartered the University of Paris, and the city came to be compared to Athens as a center of learning. He also created the Battle of the Wines, a competition that helped establish France’s supremacy in winemaking. The greatest accomplishment of his reign was territorial. Through war and diplomacy, Philip took the lands north of the Loire that had long belonged to the English, giving France access to the sea and more than doubling the size of his kingdom.
No one ever fully explained why Philip turned so violently against some of his wives. The 1966 play The Lion in Winter by James Goldman suggested that the king may not have been interested in women at all, even depicting Philip and Richard the Lionheart as lovers. Historians have noted that the two kings did spend at least one night together in the same bed, though some have explained it as a political gesture meant to unify France and England, more like a ceremonial photo opportunity than anything else. The record remains unclear.
In September 1222, the aging king fell ill and wrote his will, expecting to die. His fever worsened through the following year. When he felt well enough to travel, he set out for Paris. He died during the journey at the age of fifty-eight.
On his deathbed, he spoke to his son, the future Louis VIII, and gave him one final instruction: treat Ingeborg well. It was the only kindness he ever showed her. After twenty years as a prisoner, she was finally able to live out her remaining years as the legitimate queen of France.