Philip II

1. ("Philip of Macedon") 382-336 B.C., king of Macedonia 359-336 (father of Alexander the Great).

2. ("Philip Augustus") 1165-1223, king of France 1180-1223.

3. 1527-98, king of Spain 1556-98 (husband of Mary I).

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I

French Philippe known as Philip Augustus

born Aug. 21, 1165, Paris

died July 14, 1223, Mantes

French king (1179–1223).

The first of the great Capetian kings, he gradually reconquered the French territories held by the kings of England. He joined with Richard I on the Third Crusade, but the two kings soon quarreled. Philip returned to France (1191) and attacked English possessions; imprisoned in Austria on his journey home, Richard was freed in 1194 and promptly went to war with the French. When Richard was killed (1199), his brother John signed a treaty with Philip (1200), but within two years France and England were again at war. Philip conquered Normandy (1204) and subdued Maine, Touraine, Anjou, and most of Poitou (1204–05). John later organized a coalition against France, but he was defeated by Philip at the Battle of Bouvines (1214). Philip also expanded his territory into Flanders and Languedoc.

II

French Philippe known as Philip the Bold

born Jan. 17, 1342, Pontoise, France

died April 27, 1404, Halle, Brabant

Duke of Burgundy (1363–1404).

He was granted the duchy of Burgundy by his father, John II, and by marriage and purchase he acquired additional lands in northern and central France, Flanders, and the Netherlands. He shared the government with his brothers during the minority of his nephew Charles VI, ensuring friendly relations with England and Germany. When Charles went insane (1392), Philip became virtual ruler of France. He formed an alliance with England (1396) and withdrew his support of the Avignon papacy (1398).

III

Spanish Felipe

born , May 21, 1527, Valladolid, Spain

died Sept. 13, 1598, El Escorial

King of Spain (1556–98) and of Portugal (as Philip I, 1580–98).

The son of Emperor Charles V, Philip received from his father the duchy of Milan (1540), the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily (1554), the Netherlands (1555), and Spain and its overseas empire (1556). He ruled from the Netherlands from 1555 and waged a successful war against France in 1557. From 1559 he ruled from Spain, where he built the palace of El Escorial and encouraged Spain's literary golden age. He was a champion of the Counter-Reformation but failed to put down rebellions in the Netherlands (from 1568) and to conquer England, suffering the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588). He gained a victory in the Mediterranean with the defeat of the Ottoman offensive at the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and unified the Iberian Peninsula as king of Portugal from 1580. During his reign the Spanish empire attained its greatest power, extent, and influence.

Philip II, detail of an oil painting by Titian; in the Corsini Gallery, Rome.

Alinari/Art Resource, New York

IV

or Philip of Macedon

born 382

died 336 BC, Asia Minor

Eighteenth king of Macedonia (359–336), father of Alexander the Great.

Appointed regent for his nephew, he seized the throne. He initially promoted peace with his neighbours, using the time gained thereby to build his forces and introducing innovations in arms, tactics, and training and stabilizing his western frontier. His movements on the eastern frontier provoked the Greeks into forming a coalition against him. He intervened in the Sacred War to free Delphi from the Phocians, becoming the ally of Thebes and the Thessalian League, whose president he became. Demosthenes turned Athens against him with his Philippics (346–342), and Thebes also came to view Philip as a threat. He defeated both at the Battle of Chaeronea, becoming leader of all Greece. He formed the Greek states into the League of Corinth to attack Persia but was undone by family politics. After he took a second wife, his first wife, Olympias, left him, taking Alexander. Philip was assassinated by a Macedonian nobleman, possibly in collusion with Olympias and Alexander.

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▪ duke of Burgundy

byname  Philip the Bold,  French  Philippe le Hardi 

born Jan. 17, 1342, Pontoise, France

died April 27, 1404, Halle, Brabant

 duke of Burgundy (1363–1404) and the youngest son of the French king John II the Good. One of the most powerful men of his day in France, he was for a time regent for his nephew Charles VI; and when Charles went insane, he became virtual ruler of France.

      John II's grant of the duchy of Burgundy to Philip in September 1363 did not become effective until June 1364, when the new king, Philip's brother Charles V, confirmed it. Philip and Charles supported each other's policies. The duke's marriage (June 1369) to Margaret of Flanders was arranged by Charles to prevent her from marrying an English prince. In 1384, Philip and his wife inherited Flanders, Artois, Rethel, Nevers, Franche-Comté, and some lands in Champagne. By purchase and skillful alliance he also secured several holdings in the Netherlands. In 1386 his domains had become so extensive that he arranged separate administrations at Lille and Dijon for his northern and southern territories.

      During the minority of their nephew Charles VI, Philip and his brothers shared the government of France and the spoils of power. Philip did not hesitate to involve the government in the furtherance of his own aims, which, because of the location of his domain, were shaped by the necessity of friendly relations with Germany and England. In November 1388, Charles rejected the tutelage of his uncles; but, when Charles became insane in 1392, Philip regained his preeminence and imposed his own policies on the French government: an alliance with England (1396) and (in relation to the papal Western Schism) the withdrawal (1398) of support for the Avignon pope Benedict XIII, since Philip's Flemish subjects adhered to the Roman pope Boniface IX. He furthermore diverted huge sums from the royal treasury, thus coming into conflict with his chief rival for power, Charles VI's brother Louis, duke d'Orléans.

      Philip was a patron of the arts. He collected illuminated books and manuscripts, purchased jewelry and precious cloth, and encouraged painters. He fell heavily into debt, chiefly from financing his son John's crusade against the Ottoman Turks (1396).

▪ king of France

Introduction

byname  Philip Augustus,  French  Philippe Auguste  

born Aug. 21, 1165, Paris, Fr.

died July 14, 1223, Mantes

 the first of the great Capetian kings of medieval France (reigned 1179–1223), who gradually reconquered the French territories held by the kings of England and also furthered the royal domains northward into Flanders and southward into Languedoc. He was a major figure in the Third Crusade to the Holy Land in 1191.

Early life and kingship

      Philip was the son of Louis VII of France and Adela of Champagne. In order to be associated as king with his father, who had fallen mortally ill, he was crowned at Reims on Nov. 1, 1179. His uncles of the House of Champagne—Henry I, count of Champagne; Guillaume, archbishop of Reims; and Thibaut V, count of Blois and Chartres—hoped to use the youthful king to control France. To escape from their tutelage, Philip, on April 28, 1180, married Isabella, the daughter of Baldwin V of Hainaut and the niece (through her mother) of Philip of Alsace, the count of Flanders, who promised to give the King the territory of Artois as her dowry.

      When Henry II of England arrived in Normandy, perhaps with the intention of responding to an appeal by the House of Champagne, Philip II entered into negotiations with him and, at Gisors on June 28, 1180, renewed an understanding that Louis VII had reached with him in 1177. As a result, the House of Champagne was politically isolated, and Philip II was making all decisions for himself and acting as he saw fit when his father died, on Sept. 18, 1180, leaving him sole king in name as well as in fact.

      When the Count of Flanders allied himself with the Champagne faction, there followed a serious revolt against the King. In the Peace of Boves, in July 1185 (confirmed by the Treaty of Gisors in May 1186), the King and the Count of Flanders composed their differences (which had been chiefly over possession of Vermandois, in Picardy), so that the disputed territory was partitioned, Amiens and numerous other places passing to the King and the remainder, with the county of Vermandois proper, being left provisionally to Philip of Alsace. Thenceforward the King was free to run against Henry II of England.

Territorial expansion

      Henry's French possessions—the so-called Angevin Empire, consisting of Normandy, Maine, Anjou, and Touraine, with Aquitaine in the hands of his son, the future Richard I the Lion-Heart of England, and Brittany ruled by another son, Geoffrey (died 1186)—all were a constant menace to the French royal domain. Furthermore, there were long-standing disputes over the Vexin (between Normandy and the Île-de-France), Berry, and Auvergne.

      Philip II launched an attack on Berry in the summer of 1187 but then in June made a truce with Henry, which left Issoudun in his hands and also granted him Fréteval, in Vendômois. Though the truce was for two years, Philip found grounds for resuming hostilities in the summer of 1188. He skillfully exploited the estrangement between Henry and Richard, and Richard did homage to him voluntarily at Bonmoulins in November 1188. Finally, by the Treaty of Azay-le-Rideau, or of Colombières (July 4, 1189), Henry was forced to renew his own homage, to confirm the cession of Issoudun, with Graçay also, to Philip, and to renounce his claim to suzerainty over Auvergne. Henry died two days later.

      Richard, who succeeded Henry as king of England, had already undertaken to go on crusade (Crusades) (the Third Crusade) against Saladin in the Holy Land, and Philip now did likewise. Before his departure, he made the so-called Testament of 1190 to provide for the government of his kingdom in his absence. On his way to Palestine, he met Richard in Sicily, where they promptly found themselves at variance, though they made a treaty at Messina in March 1191. Arriving in Palestine, they cooperated against the Muslims at Acre, until Philip fell ill and made his illness a pretext for returning to France, quite determined to settle the succession to Flanders (Philip of Alsace had just died on the crusade) while Richard was still absent. Thus, by the end of 1191, Philip II was back in France.

      In spite of promises he had made in the Holy Land, Philip at once prepared to attack the Plantagenet possessions in France. Informed of this, Richard also left the crusade but was taken prisoner while on his way back by the duke of Austria, Leopold V of Babenberg. Philip did everything he could to prolong his rival's captivity, but Richard was at last set free (1194) and went to war against Philip. The French king suffered a number of defeats (from that at Fréteval in July 1194 to that at Courcelles in September 1198) in a series of campaigns that were occasionally punctuated by negotiations. It was fortuitous for Philip, however, when Richard was killed in April 1199.

      Richard's brother John was by no means as formidable a fighter. Moreover, his right to Richard's succession could be contested by Arthur of Brittany, whose father had been senior to John. To secure the succession, therefore, John came to terms with Philip: by the Treaty of Le Goulet (May 22, 1200), in return for Philip's recognition of him as Richard's heir, he ceded Évreux and the Norman Vexin to Philip; agreed that Issoudun and Graçay should be the dowry of his niece Blanche Of Castile, who was to marry the future Louis VIII (Philip's son by Isabella of Hainaut); and renounced any claim to suzerainty over Berry and Auvergne.

      Shortly afterward, however, John entered into conflict with the Lusignan Family of Poitou (in Aquitaine), who appealed to Philip as overlord. When he was summoned to appear before the royal court as a vassal of the French crown, John did not present himself, and Philip, in April 1202, pronounced John's French fiefs forfeit and undertook to carry out the sentence himself. He invaded Normandy, overran the northeast, and laid siege to Arques, while Arthur of Brittany, the son of Geoffrey, who died some years before, campaigned against John's supporters in Poitou; but John, marching south from Maine, captured Arthur at Mirebeau (August 1). In fury, Philip abandoned the siege of Arques and marched southwestward to Tours, ravaging John's territory on his way before returning to Paris. Guillaume des Roches, the powerful seneschal of Anjou, who had taken John's side, came to terms with Philip in March 1203.

      Resuming operations against Normandy, Philip occupied the towns around the great fortress of Château-Gaillard, to which he laid siege in September 1203, having overruled Pope Innocent III's (Innocent III) attempts to mediate. John, who is reported to have murdered Arthur of Brittany in April, retired to England in December, and Château-Gaillard fell to Philip in March 1204. Rouen, the Norman capital, surrendered in June, after 40 days' resistance.

      After his conquest of Normandy, Philip subdued Maine, Touraine, Anjou, and most of Poitou with less difficulty (1204–05), though the castles of Loches and Chinon held out for a year. He sought to secure his conquests by lavishing privileges on the towns and on the religious houses but otherwise left the local barons in power. Unrest, however, was endemic in Poitou, and in June 1206 John landed at La Rochelle. After a campaign in the south, he turned north toward the Loire. At Thouars in October 1206, he and Philip made a two-year truce, leaving John in possession of the reconquered Poitevin lands. In the following year, however, Philip invaded Poitou again; and, after a further campaign in 1208, only the south and part of the west of Poitou remained loyal to John (with Saintonge, Guyenne, and Gascony).

      Philip next hoped to exploit the dispute between John and Pope Innocent III. While Innocent was threatening to declare John unfit to reign (1212), plans were being made for a French landing in England and for the accession of Philip's son Louis to the English throne. The plans had to be dropped when John made his submission to the Pope (1213). Throwing himself into schemes for revenge, John formed a coalition against France: the Holy Roman emperor Otto IV, the Count of Flanders (Ferrand, or Ferdinand, of Portugal), and the Count of Boulogne (Raynald, or Renaud, of Dammartin) were to invade the Capetian territory from the northeast while John attacked from the west, with the help of his Poitevin barons.

      John landed at La Rochelle in February 1214 and advanced into Anjou but was put to flight by Louis at La Roche-aux-Moines on July 2; his confederates were completely defeated by Philip in the decisive Battle of Bouvines (Bouvines, Battle of) on July 27. The Anglo-Angevin power in France and the coalition had both been broken in one month. Thus Philip, who, in 1213, had transferred Brittany to his cousin Peter of Dreux, was left without any significant opposition to his rule in France.

      It was not only at the Plantagenets' expense that Philip enlarged the royal domain. His claim to Artois through his first marriage and his gains by the settlement of 1185–86 have been mentioned above, and he subsequently proceeded, step by step, to acquire the rest of Vermandois and Valois. His insistence on his suzerainty over vacant fiefs and on his tutelage over minors and heiresses was particularly effective with regard to Flanders, where two successive Flemish counts, Philip of Alsace (died 1191) and Baldwin IX (died c. 1205) had left no male issue.

      Though he did not personally take part in the crusade proclaimed by Pope Innocent III against a Cathari religious sect in Languedoc, Philip allowed his vassals and knights to carry it out. Simon de Montfort's capture of Béziers and Carcassonne (1209) and his victory at Muret over Raymond VI of Toulouse and Peter II of Aragon (1213) prepared the way for the eventual annexation of eastern Languedoc to the royal domain six years after Philip's death and for the union of northern and southern France under Capetian rule.

Internal affairs

      Several years before he tried to take advantage of the papacy's quarrel with John of England, Philip had himself been in dispute with Rome. After the death (1190) of Isabella of Hainaut, he had married Ingeborg, sister of the Danish king Canute IV, on Aug. 14, 1193, and on the next day, for a private reason, had resolved to separate from her. Having procured the annulment of his marriage by an assembly of bishops in November 1193, he took a Tirolese lady, Agnes, daughter of Bertold IV of Meran, as his wife in June 1196. Denmark, meanwhile, had complained to Rome about the repudiation of Ingeborg, and Pope Celestine III had countermanded it in 1195; but Celestine died (1198) before he could resort to coercion against Philip. The next pope, Innocent III, was sterner: in January 1200 he imposed an interdict on France. Philip, therefore, in September 1200, had to submit, pretending to be reconciled with Ingeborg. In fact, he refused to cohabit with her and kept her in semicaptivity until 1213, when he accepted her beside him—not as his wife but at least as his queen. Agnes had died in 1201, after bearing two children to Philip: Marie, countess of Namur (1211) and duchess of Brabant (1213), by successive marriages; and Philip, called Hurepel, count of Clermont.

      Throughout his reign, Philip kept a close watch over the French nobility, which he brought effectively to heel. He maintained excellent relations with the French clergy, leaving the canons of the cathedral chapters free to elect their bishops and favouring the monastic orders. He knew, too, how to win the support of the towns, granting privileges and liberties to merchants and frequently aiding their struggles to free themselves from the seignorial authority of the nobles. In return, the communes helped financially and militarily. Most of all, Philip gave his attention to Paris, not only fortifying it with a great rampart but also having its streets and thoroughfares put in order. For the countryside, he multiplied the number of villes neuves (“new towns”), or enfranchised communities.

      The Capetian monarchy's hold on the huge royal domain as well as on the kingdom as a whole was considerably strengthened by Philip's institution of a new class of administrative officers, the royal baillis (bailiff) and the seneschals (seneschal) for the provinces, who were appointed by the king to supervise the conduct of the local prévôts (provost) (“provosts”), to give justice in his name, to collect the revenues of the domain for him, and to call up the armed forces, in addition to other duties.

Conclusion.

      Philip II died on July 14, 1223. Knowing his own strength, he was the first of the Capetians not to have his eldest son crowned and associated with him during his lifetime; in fact, his conquests and strong government made him the richest and most powerful king in Europe and prepared the way for France's greatness in the 13th century.

Marcel Pacaut

Additional Reading

The best studies of Philip are John W. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French Royal Power in the Middle Ages (1986); and Jim Bradbury, Philip Augustus: King of France, 1180–1223 (1998).

▪ king of Macedonia

Introduction

byname  Philip of Macedon  

born 382 BC

died 336, Asia Minor

 18th king of Macedonia (359–336 BC), who restored internal peace to his country and then, by 339, had gained domination over all Greece by military and diplomatic means, thus laying the foundations for its expansion under his son Alexander III the Great.

Early life and accession

      Philip was a son of Amyntas III. In his boyhood he saw the Macedonian kingdom disintegrating while his elder brothers Alexander II and Perdiccas III, who each reigned for a few years, strove unsuccessfully against insubordination of their regional vassal princes, intervention of the strong Greek city Thebes, and invasion by the Illyrians of the northwest frontier.

      Philip himself spent some time as a hostage at Thebes, the leading city (with Athens) of this decade (370–360 BC), where the great Epaminondas, the most inventive tactician of all Greek generals until then, was in charge of the best army in Greece. These were probably the most formative years of Philip's education. When he returned to Macedonia his brother Perdiccas soon found him ready for a command.

      Philip came to the throne suddenly and unexpectedly in 359, when Perdiccas was killed meeting an Illyrian invasion. The Illyrians prepared to close in; the Paeonians were raiding from the north, and two claimants to the throne were supported by foreign powers. In this crisis Philip showed a good sense of priorities by buying off his dangerous neighbours and, with a treaty, ceding Amphipolis to Athens. He used the time gained in military preparations. The army that later conquered Persia was developed all through his reign, but the decisive innovations in arms—the sarissa, a pike nearly half as long again as the spear of the Greeks—tactics, and training belong probably to this first year.

Macedonian expansion

      In 358 he invaded Paeonia, and then he defeated the Illyrians decisively, in a battle that already suggests a master of war. The next year his marriage with Olympias, the Molossian princess of Epirus (the mother of Alexander the Great), helped to stabilize his western frontier. Now he ventured to antagonize Athens by recapturing Amphipolis, the strategic key securing the eastern frontier and giving access into Thrace; and in 356 he took the west Thracian Crenides (renamed by him Philippi), a place newly founded to exploit new finds of silver and gold in Mount Pangaeum (Pangaion, Mount). These successes frightened his neighbours into forming a coalition against him, which was joined by Athens; but it achieved nothing.

      The 10-year “war for Amphipolis” with Athens showed that the Athenians, with all their naval power, were quite unable to damage the continental and military power of Macedonia or even to save their own allies from Philip's attacks. Meanwhile he twice penetrated deeply into Thrace. And in the south a Thessaly divided against itself gave him an entry into Greece. These same 10 years saw central Greece immersed in the Sacred War to liberate Delphi from its occupation by the Phocians, enabling Philip to intervene as the ally of Thebes and the Thessalian League of city states. His only great defeat in the field came in Thessaly in 353, owing (it seems) to overconfidence and failure of reconnaissance. The next year he retrieved it with a spectacular victory, which forced the Athenians to occupy Thermopylae and bar his path to the south.

Presidency of the Thessalian League

      Characteristically, Philip declined the trial of strength, prepared to wait for six years until he could gain Thermopylae by negotiation and without striking a blow. Meanwhile his Thessalian victory earned him election as president (archōn) of the Thessalian League (probably 352), a position unique for a foreigner in a Greek confederation and one that was to bind Thessaly to the kings of Macedonia for 150 years and more.

      Philip's capture of Olynthus and annexation of Chalcidice in 348, enslaving the Olynthians and other of the Chalcidians, was disquieting to many. The Greeks themselves occasionally were brutal to small cities, but Olynthus was a large city. Philip's enemies could affect a high moral tone and contempt for a barbarous Macedonian, but even his friends might have wondered whether he ought to be allowed into the heart of Greece with an army. Yet there were many ways in which he could serve them. Particularly, he could finish the Sacred War, which the Thessalians, Thebans, and others still could not finish for themselves. Athens could not prevent this now and had reason to fear that Philip's next campaign in Thrace (346) might challenge its own control of the sea route to southern Russia, its main source for imported corn. Significantly, however, it was Philip, and not Athens, who made the first overtures for peace, though all the military initiatives lay in his own hand. His plans for the future, in Greece and farther afield, included Athens as a willing ally, not as a defeated enemy.

      Even before the peace with Athens was ratified (346), the Athenian publicist Isocrates was inviting Philip to reconcile the four leading cities of Greece and to lead a united Greek alliance in a war of expansion against Persia (Iran, ancient). A step in this direction was Philip's intervention now to end the Sacred War, in recognition of which he was admitted to membership of the Delphic Amphictyony—an association of neighbouring states. The votes of the Thessalians and their clients gave him a control of its council, which could be used on occasion for political and diplomatic ends.

      He lost no opportunity in the next years (346–343) of penetrating Greece without war, by winning and buying friends among the politicians of the smaller cities and intervening occasionally with subsidies or a force of mercenaries in their local disturbances. This policy made him some enemies, too, and it played into the hands of the great orator Demosthenes and others at Athens. Demosthenes saw Philip now as a bar to Athenian greatness and a threat to its freedom and existence; he talked tirelessly to warn the Athenians of the danger and to convince the Greeks in general that it was their danger too. Philip in these years conciliated Athens in small ways even under provocation, but he came to see that Demosthenes and the anti-Macedonians were beyond conciliation (343–342). Meanwhile, he reasserted his suzerainty over the neighbouring Illyrians, tightened his grip on Thessaly, and in 342 began the series of campaigns in Thrace that enabled him in two years to annex great parts of it as a province, and finally to demonstrate his power against the Scythians settled on the southern banks of the Danube Delta. The events in Thrace caused two of his Greek allies, the cities of Perinthus (later called Heraclea, present-day Marmaraereğlisi) and Byzantium, to review their position, and his coercion of them led to the two great sieges that showed the development of his artillery and allied arms, of which his son Alexander was to make greater use in Asia.

      The declaration of war by Athens in 340 enabled him to raise the two sieges without undue loss of face, though he had failed to establish a threat to the Athenian corn route to southern Russia. Athens was to be intimidated now by invasion of its territory through central Greece, where the key position was held by Thebes, his ally hitherto, but of late a dissatisfied and recalcitrant one. His services to it in the Sacred War had been more than offset by his new position as its successful rival for leadership in and through the Amphictyony, and his moves toward hegemony in Greece could be seen in Thebes as encroachments.

Victory of Chaeronea

      When Philip swept south with his army in November 339, he hoped to rush the Thebans into honouring their alliance and letting him through into Attica. The Thebans listened instead to Demosthenes and to their own instinct of self-preservation. The Greek alliance became something formidable with the accession of Thebes, and Philip was forced, as a contemporary orator put it with only a mild exaggeration, “to stake his all on the issue of one short day.” Chaeronea was a famous victory, gained by decisive blows of Philip's cavalry. His real skill as a general can be seen, though dimly, in a manoeuvre of controlled retreat aimed at dislocating the advancing Greeks and creating gaps for the cavalry to strike. By winning this battle he had won the war.

      In the various peace treaties with the Greek states, Thebes had to admit a Macedonian garrison, and its democratic constitution was replaced by a pro-Macedonian government; but Athens suffered neither invasion of its territory nor interference with its democracy and was not disarmed by dismantling of the walls or surrender of the navy. For Philip, Athens was the one Greek state from which he needed not neutrality or unwilling alliance but active cooperation. All past experience had shown that wars against Persia succeeded only when the Persians were denied the use of the Aegean, and for this the great Athenian navy was the first need.

      In Greece (outside Thessaly), Philip could have had no illusions about his own unpopularity, except among those of the well-to-do who were attracted by his court and his patronage; some cities also (especially the neighbours of Sparta) were glad to lean on Macedonia for support against an ancient enemy. Philip intended to involve all the Greeks with the Persian war. So Isocrates had advised him eight years before; but on the details of the ways and means he had no advice to offer. Philip himself organized the Greeks now to keep the peace with him and with each other and to support him in the Persian war overseas. In the constitutional details of his settlement of Greece he may well have had the help of Aristotle, free from his recent duties as tutor of the young Alexander.

The League of Corinth (Corinth, League of)

      Philip's so-called League of Corinth, established in 337, was an organization designed to preserve and perpetuate a general peace (koinē eirēnē), inaugurated when the delegates of all the states of Greece (except Sparta) and the islands swore to abide by it and to recognize Philip as president (hēgemōn) for this purpose. The general peace was a political innovation of the Greeks themselves, used several times in the past 50 years in attempts to stabilize affairs while promoting this or that hegemony. The peace had never lasted long because the leading Greek states had neither the power nor the mutual trust to create an effective organization for collective action against aggressors.

      Philip designed a council of representatives from all the states (synedrion), which was empowered to deliberate and decide on action to be taken in the event of the peace being broken or threatened. After the decisions were made, their execution lay with Philip as hēgemōn. The states were under obligation to supply troops or ships to the hēgemōn on demand, by quotas corresponding to their voting power on the council. Though neither Philip nor Macedonia had representatives on the council, it was the knowledge that the hēgemōn had the power of Macedonia in his hand that made this organization effective. As it happened, Corinth, where the inaugural meeting was held, was one of only three Greek cities with a Macedonian garrison, a fact the significance of which can have been lost on nobody.

Last years

      Philip was wise, no doubt, to build on the foundation of the earlier practice of the Greeks themselves and also to refrain from organizing them in any permanent alliance that would have recalled too much the unpalatable experiences of the past. He was not, however, a Greek politician or even a Greek, but king of the Macedonians; and he cannot possibly have seen the settlement of Greece—as most modern historians have seen it—as the culmination of his life's work. For him it culminated nothing and was not even an end in itself but only a means. Chaeronea had brought the Greeks to order, and his plans required that they should stay in order now. The synedrion at Corinth heard his program for a Persian war and duly acclaimed it early in 337. Early the next year an advance force of the Macedonian army crossed to Asia Minor. Philip would lead the grand army into Asia presently, and the Greeks would be with him.

      This meteor fizzled out. The subtle, pliant, patient, calculating diplomatist, master of timing in politics and war, ended his life in a tale of irresponsible incompetence. The historian Theopompus (Theopompus of Chios), who saw Philip at close quarters, made much of his vices, his love of drink and debauchery, and his wild extravagance with money. Allowance made for this notably faultfinding and puritanical writer, Philip's character did contain some real ambiguities, extending into his domestic life. His “political marriages” were mostly opportune symbols of goodwill toward princes or groups worth conciliating, but his last marriage, in 338, to the Macedonian Cleopatra, led to a final break with Olympias, his queen, who left the country accompanied by the crown prince Alexander (Alexander the Great). Though Olympias was unpopular at court and though Cleopatra's connections were powerful and important, it was not “politic” to put the succession in jeopardy. Philip showed that he had never intended this result, by taking trouble to be reconciled with Alexander. The tradition that makes him infatuated with Cleopatra is probably right. If so, he misjudged fatally the amount of harm that could be done by marrying her.

      With the preparations far advanced for the crossing into Asia, at the grand celebration of his daughter Cleopatra's marriage to Alexander of Epirus (brother of Olympias), Philip was assassinated by Pausanias, a young Macedonian noble with a bitter grievance against the young queen's uncle Attalus and against Philip for denying him justice. This was the official explanation, and Pausanias himself could add nothing to it; he was killed on the spot. Suspicion fell on Olympias and Alexander, those with most to gain from Philip's death, and many modern interpreters have followed it. Aristotle, however, clearly did not believe it. In his Politics a few years later he used this incident as an example of a monarch murdered for private and personal motives—which would have been a puerile indiscretion if either he or the world in general had ever taken the canard seriously.

Assessment

      So ended, unworthily, the first of the great Macedonians. Everything known about him comes from Greek sources, which concentrate on his impact upon the Greeks and their history. Yet even more impressive, in view of Macedonia's troubled and undistinguished past, would be the full story of his unification and expansion of his own kingdom; his control of its regional princes, nobles, and gentry and their retainers, to form a great Macedonian people, symbolized by the finest army the world had seen; and his continuing attrition by warfare and diplomacy, which in some 20 years reduced much of the Balkan peninsula to subservience.

      The apparently untidy record of his campaigns into Illyria or Thrace and of his interventions with diplomacy or arms (or both) in Thessaly, Euboea, and the Peloponnese, which might suggest that repetition is a sign of incompetence, seem better interpreted as the work of a strategist operating always on several fronts, often preferring diplomacy to war, limited objectives to the grandiose, the smaller risks to the greatest; especially never forgetting that there is always another day. His decisive day at Chaeronea came, in a sense, because his true policy in Greece had failed, thanks partly to Demosthenes. But probably to take control of Greece without a Chaeronea was a real impossibility at this date (or indeed later).

      Though Philip certainly wanted to be acceptable in Greece and did attract many important Greeks to his court, his philhellenism has been overrated: Olynthus and other Greek cities knew better. Though he cultivated the Athenians for reasons of high policy, there is no evidence that he ever in his life set foot in Athens, a remarkable piece of insouciance at every level. Pella, his capital, had long been a resort or refuge of great men of letters, and under Philip the connection with Plato's Academy was preserved, Theopompus was entertained, and Isocrates was invited; the leading actors of the Athenian stage appeared in Macedonia, too. Aristotle, whose father had been physician to Amyntas, Philip's father, spent three or four important years as Alexander's tutor.

      Philip presumably was at home with these people, but tradition says nothing of him as a man of letters himself or as an intellectual, though as an orator he could impress a party of Athenians that included Demosthenes and Aeschines and other professionals. His charm was great; he was by nature convivial, hospitable, and a bon viveur. Undoubtedly he drank too much and too often, with the saving grace that he was known to listen to home truths even when drunk. As a commander in the field he was unwearying, and in action he fought like a lion; in the end he was really disfigured with old wounds. He was a general perhaps not of genius but of a very high order, with the tactical skill to coordinate the cavalry and infantry arms which were largely of his own creating. Making and training over the years a great army, he was paradoxically sparing and even cautious in using it.

      If he had survived to invade Asia, it would not have been to overthrow the Persian Empire. He might have established a Macedonian empire in Asia, perhaps, but it would have been a Mediterranean empire in character. The Greeks would have benefitted by colonization, but the problem of Greek freedom would have remained, with the political domination of the higher culture by the lower. Philip was aware of the problem, and the League of Corinth, with its facade of freedom, was his answer. It did not deceive the Greeks or satisfy them; but no later Macedonian king could improve on it. Philip had made Macedonia, and now Macedonia and its kings made world history.

Guy Thompson Griffith

Additional Reading

The major ancient history of Philip and his age, Theopompus, Philippica, in 58 volumes, survives only in fragmentary quotations by other authors. Historical summaries survive in the work of the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, Book XVI, and the Roman Justin's summary of Pompeius Trogus, Books VII–IX. The contemporary Athenian orators Demosthenes, Aeschines, and Isocrates preserve much information in the context of the polemics of Athenian politics.J.R. Ellis, Philip II and Macedonian Imperialism (1976); George Cawkwell, Philip of Macedon (1978); and Alfred S. Bradford (compiler, ed., and trans.), Philip II of Macedon: A Life from the Ancient Sources (1992), are balanced, well-researched biographies. A biography from one of the most important historians of ancient Greece is N.G.L. Hammond, Philip of Macedon (1994). N.G.L. Hammond and G.T. Griffith (eds.), A History of Macedonia, vol. 2 (1979), is also a valuable reference. A useful section of a longer work is J.R. Ellis, “Macedon and North-West Greece,” and “Macedonian Hegemony Created,” chapters 14–15 in The Cambridge Ancient History, 2nd ed., vol. 6, The Fourth Century B.C. (1994), ed. by D.M. Lewis et al., pp. 723–790, as well as the bibliography in the same volume, pp. 937–939.

▪ king of Spain and Portugal

Introduction

born , May 21, 1527, Valladolid, Spain

died Sept. 13, 1598, El Escorial, Spain

 king of the Spaniards (1556–98) and king of the Portuguese (as Philip I, 1580–98), champion of the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation. During his reign the Spanish Empire attained its greatest power, extent, and influence, though he failed to suppress the revolt of the Netherlands (beginning in 1566) and lost the “Invincible Armada” in the attempted invasion of England (1588).

Early life and marriages

      Philip was the son of the Holy Roman emperor Charles V and Isabella of Portugal. From time to time, the emperor wrote Philip secret memoranda, impressing on him the high duties to which God had called him and warning him against trusting any of his advisers too much. Philip, a very dutiful son, took this advice to heart. From 1543 Charles conferred on his son the regency of Spain whenever he himself was abroad. From 1548 until 1551, Philip traveled in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands, but his great reserve and his inability to speak fluently any language except Castilian made him unpopular with the German and Flemish nobility.

      Philip contracted four marriages. The first was with his cousin Maria of Portugal in 1543. She died in 1545, giving birth to the ill-fated Don Carlos (Carlos de Austria). In 1554 Philip married Mary I of England and became joint sovereign of England until Mary's death, without issue, in 1558. Philip's third marriage, with Elizabeth of Valois, daughter of Henry II of France, in 1559, was the result of the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (Cateau-Cambrésis, Peace of) (1559), which, for a generation, ended the open wars between Spain and France. Elizabeth bore Philip two daughters, Isabella Clara Eugenia (1566–1633) and Catherine Micaela (1567–97). Elizabeth died in 1568, and in 1570 Philip married Anna of Austria, daughter of his first cousin the emperor Maximilian II. She died in 1580, her only surviving son being the later Philip III.

King of Spain

      Philip had received the Duchy of Milan from Charles V in 1540 and the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily in 1554 on the occasion of his marriage to Mary of England. On October 25, 1555, Charles resigned the Netherlands in Philip's favour and, on January 16, 1556, the kingdoms of Spain and the Spanish overseas empire. Shortly afterward Philip also received the Franche-Comté. The Habsburg dominions in Germany and the imperial title went to his uncle Ferdinand I. At this time Philip was in the Netherlands. After the victory over the French at St. Quentin (1557), the sight of the battlefield gave him a permanent distaste for war, though he did not shrink from it when he judged it necessary.

      After his return to Spain from the Netherlands in 1559, Philip never again left the Iberian Peninsula. From Madrid he ruled his empire through his personal control of official appointments and all forms of patronage. Philip's subjects outside Castile, thus, never saw him, and they gradually turned not only against his ministers but also against him. This happened particularly in the Netherlands, in Granada, and in Aragon.

Method of government

      By sheer hard work Philip tried to overcome the defects of this system. His methods have become famous. All work was done on paper, on the basis of consultas (that is, memoranda, reports, and advice presented him by his ministers). In Madrid, or in the gloomy magnificence of his monastic palace of El Escorial, which he built (1563–84) on the slopes of the Sierra de Guadarrama, the king worked alone in his small office, giving his decisions or, as often, deferring them. Nothing is known of his order of work, but all his contemporaries agreed that his methods dangerously, and sometimes fatally, slowed down a system of government already notorious for its dilatoriness. Philip was painstaking and conscientious in his cravings for ever more information, hiding an inability to distinguish between the important and the trivial and a temperamental unwillingness to make decisions.

      This was coupled with an almost pathological suspicion of even his most able and faithful servants. Margaret of Parma; the Duke of Alba (Alba, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo y Pimentel, 3er duque de (3rd duke of)); Don John of Austria; Antonio Pérez (Pérez, Antonio); and Alessandro Farnese (Farnese, Alessandro, duke of Parma and Piacenza)—to name only the most distinguished—suffered disgrace. “His smile and his dagger were very close,” wrote his official court historian, Cabrera de Córdoba. It was no exaggeration, for, in the case of Juan de Escobedo, the secretary of Don John of Austria, Philip even consented to murder. As a result, Philip's court became notorious for the bitterness of its faction fights. The atmosphere of the Spanish court did much to poison the whole Spanish system of government, and this played no small part in causing the rebellions of the Netherlanders (1568–1609), of the Moriscos of Granada (1568–70), and of the Aragonese (1591–92).

      Yet the “black legend” that, in Protestant countries, represented Philip II as a monster of bigotry, ambition, lust, and cruelty is certainly false. Philip's spare and elegant appearance is known from the famous portraits by Titian and by Anthonis Mor (Sir Anthony More). He was a lover of books and pictures, and Spain's literary Golden Age began in his reign. An affectionate father to his daughters, he lived an austere and dedicated life. “You may assure His Holiness,” Philip wrote to his ambassador in Rome, in 1566, “that rather than suffer the least damage to religion and the service of God, I would lose all my states and an hundred lives, if I had them; for I do not propose nor desire to be the ruler of heretics.” This remark may be regarded as the motto of his reign. To accomplish the task set him by God of preserving his subjects in the true Catholic religion, Philip felt in duty bound to use his royal powers, if need be, to the point of the most ruthless political tyranny, as he did in the Netherlands. Even the popes found it sometimes difficult to distinguish between Philip's views as to what was the service of God and what the service of the Spanish monarchy.

Foreign policy

 For the first 20 years of his reign, Philip sought to preserve peace with his neighbours in western Europe. He was fighting a major naval war with the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean and, from 1568, he was faced with rebellion and war in the Netherlands. From the late 1570s, his policy gradually changed. The death (August 1578) without heirs of his nephew, King Sebastian of Portugal, opened up the prospect of Philip's succession to Portugal. He had to conquer (1580) by force what he regarded as his just, hereditary rights, but the rest of Europe was alarmed at this growth in Spanish power.

      Both England and France gave increasing support to the rebellious provinces of the Netherlands. Gradually, in the 1580s, Philip became convinced that the Catholic religion in western Europe, and his own authority in the Netherlands, could be saved only by open intervention against England and France. To this end he fitted out the Armada that, with the help of the Spanish Army in the Netherlands, was intended to conquer England (1588). He sent money and troops to support the League, the ultra-Catholic party in France, against Henry of Navarre (Henry IV) and the Huguenots (Huguenot). He even claimed the throne of France for his daughter, Isabella Clara Eugenia, after the murder of Henry III in 1589. Again, even his Catholic allies found it difficult to distinguish between Philip's championship of the Catholic church and the interests of Spain.

      All these plans failed. Henry of Navarre became a Catholic (1593) and Philip had to accept (Peace of Vervins, 1598) his succession as Henry IV of France. England and the northern Netherlands remained Protestant and unconquered. Yet Philip's reign as a whole was not a failure. He had defeated the great Ottoman offensive in the Mediterranean at the Battle of Lepanto (Lepanto, Battle of) (1571). In the Iberian Peninsula he had completed the work of unification begun by the “Catholic Monarchs,” Ferdinand and Isabella. Most important of all, in his own eyes, he had won great victories for the Catholic church. If England, Scotland, and the northern Netherlands were lost, the southern Netherlands (modern Belgium) had been preserved. In Spain and Italy he had prevented the spread of heresy, and his intervention in France was one of the factors that forced Henry IV to become a Catholic.

      When Philip II died of cancer at El Escorial in 1598, Spain was still at the height of its power; it took almost 50 years before it was clear that the Counter-Reformation would make no further major conquests.

Helmut Georg Koenigsberger

Additional Reading

The fullest account of Philip II's life was written in the early 17th century by his official court historian, Luis Cabrera de Córdoba, Filipe Segundo, rey de España, 4 vol. in 8 (1876–77); Cabrera was very well informed, especially about life and personalities at Philip's court, and his work has proved indispensable to all later biographers. An excellent full-scale modern biography is Henry Kamen, Philip of Spain (1997). Garrett Mattingly, The Armada (1959, reissued 1989; also published as The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 1959, reissued 2000), is distinguished both by its impeccable scholarship and by the brilliance of its writing. An attempt to assess Philip II's aims and methods in the light of modern research is an article by H.G. Koenigsberger, “The Statecraft of Philip II,” in European Studies Review, 1:1–21 (1971).

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