Charles (12 March 1270 – 16 December 1325), count of Valois, was a member of the House of Capet and founder of the House of Valois, which ruled over France from 1328 to 1589. He was the fourth son of King Philip III of France and Isabella of Aragon.
Charles ruled several principalities. He held in appanage the counties of Valois, Alençon (1285), and Perche. He became Count of Anjou and Maine through his first marriage to Margaret, Countess of Anjou. Through his second marriage to Catherine I, Latin Empress of Constantinople, he was titular Latin Emperor of Constantinople from 1301 to 1307, although he ruled from exile and only had authority over Crusader States in Greece.
As the grandson of King Louis IX of France, Charles of Valois was a son, brother, brother-in-law and son-in-law of kings or queens (of France, Navarre, England and Naples), and was the heir presumptive to the throne of France from 1322 to 1324 and then again from 1324 until his death in 1325. His descendants, the House of Valois, would become the royal house of France three years after his death, beginning with his eldest son King Philip VI of France.
Besides holding in appanage the counties of Valois, Alençon and Perche, Charles became in 1290 the Count of Anjou and of Maine by his first marriage with Margaret of Anjou, the eldest daughter of King Charles II of Naples, titular King of Sicily; by a second marriage that he contracted with the heiress of Emperor Baldwin II of Constantinople, last Latin emperor of Constantinople, he also had pretensions to the throne of Constantinople.
From his early years, Charles of Valois dreamed of more and sought all his life for a crown he never obtained. Starting in 1284, Pope Martin IV recognized him as King of Aragon (under the vassalage of the Holy See), as the son of his mother, Isabella of Aragon, in opposition to King Peter III of Aragon, who after the conquest of the island of Sicily was an enemy of the Papacy. Charles hence married Margaret, the daughter of the Neapolitan king, in order to re-enforce his position in Sicily which was supported by the Pope. Thanks to this Aragonese Crusade undertaken by his father King Philip III against the advice of his elder brother Philip IV, he believed he would win a kingdom and however won nothing but the ridicule of having been crowned with a cardinal's hat in 1285, which gave him the alias of the "King of the Cap." He would never dare to use the royal seal which was made on this occasion and had to renounce the title.
Amid the Gascon and Franco-Flemish Wars, Charles commanded effectively in Flanders in 1297.
Campaign in Italy and Invasion of Sicily
Dreaming of an imperial crown, in 1301 Charles married the titular empress of Constantinople, Catherine of Courtenay. The marriage drew Charles closer to the papacy, as his new marriage needed the connivance of Pope Boniface VIII. Boniface saw Charles as a potential ally and tool to further papal influence; the pope desired to re-install a Catholic ruler on the throne of the Byzantine Empire and thus revive the Latin Empire, which Charles now had a claim to. Boniface was also eager to end the nearly 20-year long war between the papacy, Angevin Naples, and Sicily, and so hoped to have Charles' army invade Sicily.
Named papal vicar, Charles of Valois led a private French army into Italy. However, he soon lost himself in the complexity of Italian politics, namely the generational feud between the Guelphs and Ghibellines. Local nobles and church officials used his army as a tool against their political rivals, and men under his command massacred a crowd in Florence. When his army landed on the shores of Sicily in May 1302, it faced heavy resistance from the Sicilian population. Charles' army pushed inland, but became mired in attritional warfare in the hot Sicilian summer; after a disastrous attempt to besiege Sciacca, Charles' army found itself out of supplies and surrounded on the southern coast of Sicily. Rather than see his army destroyed, Charles negotiated the Peace of Caltabellotta with the Sicilian leadership, thus ending the war of the Vespers. The Sicilian campaign had been a disaster; Charles' battered army had been forced to evacuate the island without having fought a major battle, and the treaty ended Angevin and papal attempts to re-conquer Sicily.
Charles of Valois and Byzantium
After his marriage to Catherine, Charles decided to reclaim his wife's empire. To fulfil this eastern ambition he had to secure the support of all those influential political figures of the time. The first and foremost was his brother, Philip IV of France.
Indeed, Philip promised to help his brother and gave assurances that he would do so by offering him some money, but in reality, he was too enmeshed in the war with Flanders which was at a critical point as the French had suffered a major disaster at the battle of Courtrai in 1302 to seriously consider a crusader expedition to Byzantium, not least his conflict with pope Boniface VIII which erupted in 1302. Boniface VIII's publication of the bull Unam Sanctam in November 1302 which asserted the papal supremacy precipitated the crisis with the king of France. Following the publication of the bull Philip IV went on to publish a series of forged letters dated on 5 December to induce the national feeling of the French clergy and people. To be sure, the French king and his officials Guillame de Nogaret and Guillame de Plaisians condemned the pope in two assemblies that took place in March and June 1303 in Paris in front of the French the prelature and nobility. On his behalf Charles of Valois tried to mediate the situation between his brother and the pope but to no avail. The "outrage of Anagni" followed and the death of pope Boniface VIII thereon.
While in Sicily, where he negotiated the Peace of Caltabellotta, Charles of Valois confirmed and renewed an anti-Byzantine treaty with Charles II, king of Naples in Viterbo, on 11 March 1302. Charles then turned to the Robert II, Duke of Burgundy who, after having inherited from his father Hugh IV the rights to the kingdom of Thessalonica, conferred on the latter in 1266 by Baldwin II, the Latin emperor, had started showing interest on the matter by 1303. The son of Robert II, Hugh in the meantime swore allegiance to the titular empress Catherine of Courtenay, wife of Charles of Valois and on March 24, 1303 he became affianced to their daughter Catherine of Valois. Necessary precondition for this marriage alliance to take place was the young man to promise the recovery of his prospective wife inheritance and his future "kingdom". Some two years later in January 1305 the couple, Charles of Valois and Catherine of Courtenay confirmed Hugh V, Duke of Burgundy as in possession of the kingdom of Thessalonica. Insofar as Charles of Valois might really recover Constantinople the marriage of the issue of Valois-Courtenay and the confirmation of Hugh were of significance to the House of Burgundy because that would eventually make Hugh an emperor. That potential relationship to work, however, needed first the investment in material support with men and money from the House of Burgundy.
As any other crusader expedition such a plan needed papal endorsement and a plan for the conquest of Constantinople was no less a crusade since the Greeks were heretics and schismatics, thus the project was a very desirable enterprise and the pope was more favourable than not to such a possibility. On the other hand, the fall of Acre in 1291 to the Mamluks had reinvigorated crusader zeal in Western Europe and countless theoretic crusading projects were published and presented to successive popes for that matter from 1291 up to 1330. A profound discrepancy of objectives surfaces here which meant that the pope had to be convinces for such a crucial shift to take the stead of the primary enterprise, the recapture of Jerusalem. Thus, Charles of Valois requested the aid of the new pope, Benedict XI. His shortlived papacy did not amount to anything more than the grant of a tithe. The situation took a decisive turn in January 1305 with the election of Pope Clement V, who, as a French himself, was well disposed towards the royal house of France and eager to restore good relations with Philip IV and his family. With a rather positive climate of peace and cooperation with Philip IV, Clement V and Charles of Valois expedited things in approximately two years time and the crusade now seemed more than merely plausible. Suffice here to note that the stance of emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos who repudiated the Union of the churches that had been proclaimed at the Second Council of Lyons in 1274, offered the necessary justification to set in motion the papal propaganda machinery. That reason along with the faltered policies of the emperor in Asia Minor established the meaningful link that saw the recapture of Jerusalem as the afterthought of an elevated morale. Significantly, however, it had translated the wishful expedition of Charles of Valois to a crusade project which he eventually proclaimed.