5 THE WORLD OF THE EARLY CAPETIAN COURT 987–1180 Talia Zajac 1 Older historiography considered the rule of the early Capetians as the “nadir of the French monarchy” (Bull 2002, 11). This traditional narrative outlines a decline of royal power under Hugh Capet (r. 987–996), Robert II the Pious (r. 996–1031), Henri I (r. 1031–106), Philip I (r. 1060–1108), and then a gradual revival under Louis VI (r. 1108–1137) and Louis VII (r. 1137–1180). Louis VI and Louis VII gained firmer control over the royal domain and entered into a mutually beneficial alliance with the Abbey of Saint-Denis and with the reformed papacy. By the end of the twelfth century, the king’s authority as the head of a kingdom-wide political community was increasingly recognized by the territorial princes in both theory and practice. How, then, to explain this twelfth-century “renaissance of kingship” (Fawtier [1942] 1982, 19)? For the early Capetian king never faded into complete oblivion or irrelevance. The idea of a king remained a powerful one in the late tenth to late twelfth century. To understand why this was the case, scholars agree that it is important to understand the wider political culture in which the Capetian kings operated, including their use of ritu- als and material objects to justify, communicate, and expand royal power (Koziol 1992; Field and Gaposchkin 2014). Together with such approaches drawn from cultural history and anthropology, scholarship increasingly has separated the Capetians from a “birth of France” meta-narrative (Hallam 1980; Bull 2002, 1; Kempf 2014). As France itself was in the process of formation during the entire Middle Ages, its borders flexible and not per- fectly equivalent to modern-day political boundaries, the prism of a modern nation-state obscures more than clarifies the practice of Capetian rulership (Bull 2002, 1). Instead of examining the Capetians’ role in helping or hindering proto-national political formation, more recent studies place Capetian kingship within its own contemporary context of medi- eval European and even Eurasian practices of rulership (for instance, Dale 2019). Some important factors that emerge from such contextual studies of rulership are the importance of church liturgy, visual images of royal majesty, personal charisma, and social relation- ships that the Capetians used to maintain royal power. The practice of Capetian rulership thus cannot be understood without reference to the social, cultural, and political context in which it was embedded: the wider world of the court. From the tenth until the mid-twelfth century, medieval sources use the term “royal 53 DOI: 10.4324/9780367808471-6