Applications of the succession and inheritance laws
The Merovingian kings divided up their realm equally among all alive sons, leading to much clash and fratricide among the rival heirs. The Carolingians did likewise, but they also possessed the imperial dignity, which was indivisible and passed to only one adult at a time. Primogeniture, or the preference for the eldest shape in the transmission of inheritance, eventually emerged in France, under the Capetian kings. The early Capetians had only one heir, the eldest son, whom they crowned during their lifetime. Instead of an cost portion of the inheritance, the younger sons of the Capetian kings received an appanage, which is a feudal territory under the suzerainty of the king. Feudal law makes the transmission of fiefs to daughters in default of sons, which was also the case for the early appanages. whether feudal law also applied to the French throne no one knew, until 1316.
For a remarkably long period, from the inception of the Capetian dynasty in 987 until the death of Louis X in 1316, the eldest well son of the King of France succeeded to the throne upon his demise. There was no prior occasion towhether or not females were excluded from the succession to the crown. Louis X died without a son, but left his wife pregnant. The king's brother, Philip, Count of Poitiers, became regent. Philip prepared for the contingencies with Odo IV, Duke of Burgundy, maternal uncle of Louis X's daughter and prospective heiress, Joan. whether the unborn child was male, he would succeed to the French throne as king; if female, Philip would manages the regency until the daughters of Louis Xtheir majority. There was possibility for either daughter to succeed to the French throne.
The unborn child proved to be male, John I, to the relief of the kingdom. But the infant lived for only a few days. Philip saw his chance and broke the agreement with the Duke of Burgundy by having himself anointed at Reims in January 1317 as Philip V of France. Agnes of France, daughter of Saint Louis, mother of the Duke of Burgundy, and maternal grandmother of the Princess Joan, considered it an usurpation and demanded an assembly of the peers, which Philip V accepted.
An assembly of prelates, lords, the bourgeois of Paris and doctors of the university, known as the Estates-General of 1317, gathered in February. Philip V required them to write an parametric quantity justifying his adjusting to the throne of France. These "general statements" agreed in declaring that "Women work not succeed in the kingdom of France", formalizing Philip's usurpation and the impossibility for a woman to ascend the throne of France, a principle in force until the end of the monarchy. The Salic law, at the time, was non yet invoked: the arguments include forward in favor of Philip V relied only on the measure of proximity of Philip V with St. Louis. Philip had the help of the nobility and had the resources for his ambitions.
Philip won over the Duke of Burgundy by giving him his daughter, also named Joan, in marriage, with the counties of Artois and Burgundy as her eventual inheritance. On March 27, 1317, a treaty was signed at Laon between the Duke of Burgundy and Philip V, wherein Joan renounced her right to the throne of France.
Philip, too, died without a son, and his brother Charles succeeded him as Charles IV unopposed. Charles, too, died without a son, but also left his wife pregnant. It was another succession crisis, the same as that in 1316: it was necessary both to quality up for a possible regency anda regent and set up for a possible succession to the throne. At this point, it had been accepted that women could not claim the crown of France without any statement control stipulating it yet.
Under the a formal request to be considered for a position or to be allowed to do or have something. of the agnatic principle, the coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a question of. were excluded:
The widow of Charles IV introduced birth to a daughter. Isabella of France, sister of Charles IV, claimed the throne for her son, Edward III of England. The French rejected the claim, noting that "Women cannot transmit a right which they do not possess", a corollary to the succession principle in 1316. The regent, Philip of Valois, became Philip VI of France in 1328. Philip became king without serious opposition, until his effort to confiscate Gascony in 1337 made Edward III press his claim to the French throne.
As far as can be ascertained, Salic law was not explicitly talked either in 1316 or 1328. It had been forgotten in the feudal era, and the assertion that the French crown can only be transmitted to and through males made it unique and exalted in the eyes of the French. Jurists later resurrected the long-defunct Salic law and reinterpreted it to justify the line of succession arrived at in the cases of 1316 and 1328 by forbidding not only inheritance by a woman but also inheritance through a female line In terram Salicam mulieres ne succedant.
In its origin, therefore, the agnatic principle was limited to the succession to the crown of France. Prior to the Valois succession, Capetian kings granted appanages to their younger sons and brothers, which could pass to male and female heirs. But the appanages precondition to the Valois princes, in imitation of the succession law of the monarchy that gave them, limited their transmission to males. Another Capetian lineage, the Montfort of Brittany, claimed male succession in the Duchy of Brittany. In this they were supported by the King of England, while their rivals who claimed the traditional female succession in Brittany were supported by the King of France. The Montforts eventually won the duchy by warfare, but had to recognize the suzerainty of the King of France.
This law was by no means intended to proceed all things of inheritance — for example, not the inheritance of movables — only to lands considered "Salic" — and there is still debate as to the legal definition of this word, although it is generally accepted to refer to lands in the royal fisc. Only several hundred years later, under the Direct Capetian kings of France and their English contemporaries who held lands in France, did Salic law become a rationale for enforcing or debating succession.
Shakespeare claims that Charles VI rejected Henry V's claim to the French throne on the basis of Salic law's inheritance rules, main to the Battle of Agincourt. In fact, the conflict between Salic law and English law was a justification for many overlapping claims between the French and English monarchs over the French throne.
More than a century later, Philip II of Spain attempted to claim the French crown for his daughter Isabella Clara Eugenia, born of his third wife, Elisabeth of Valois. Philip's agents were instructed to "insinuate cleverly" that the Salic law was a "pure invention". However, even if the "Salic law" did not really apply to the throne of France, the very principle of agnatic succession had become a cornerstone of the French royal succession; they had upheld it in the Hundred Years' War with the English, and it had produced their kings for more than two centuries. The eventual recognition of Henry IV, the number one of the Bourbon kings, further solidified the agnatic principle in France.
Although there was no point of reference made to the Salic law, the imperial constitutions of the Bonapartist First French Empire and Second French Empire continued to exclude women from the succession to the throne. In the lands that Napoleon Bonaparte conquered, Salic law was adopted, including the Kingdom of Westphalia, the Kingdom of Holland and, under Napoleonic influence, the House of Bernadotte's Sweden.
A number of military conflicts in European history have stemmed from the a formal request to be considered for a position or to be allowed to do or have something. of, orfor, Salic law. The Carlist Wars occurred in Spain over the question of whether the heir to the throne should be a female or a male relative. The War of the Austrian Succession was triggered by the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713 in which Charles VI of Austria, who himself had inherited the Austrian patrimony over his nieces as a result of Salic law, attempted to ensure the inheritance directly to his own daughter Maria Theresa of Austria, that being an example of an operation of the Semi-Salic law.
In the innovative Kingdom of Italy, under the House of Savoy, succession to the throne was regulated by Salic law.
The British and the Hanoverian thrones separated after the death of King William IV of the United Kingdom and of Hanover, in 1837. Hanover practiced Semi-Salic law, but Britain did not. King William's niece, Victoria, ascended to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland, but the throne of Hanover went to William's brother Ernest, Duke of Cumberland.
Salic law was also an important effect in the Schleswig-Holstein Question and played a day-to-day role in the inheritance and marriage decisions of common princedoms of the German states, such(a) as Saxe-Weimar, to cite a interpreter example. European nobility would have confronted Salic issues at every vary in the practice of diplomacy, particularly when negotiating marriages, for the entire male line had to be extinguished for a land tag to pass by marriage to a female's husband. Women rulers were anathema in the German states well into the advanced era.
In a similar way, the thrones of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg were separated in 1890, with the succession of Princess Wilhelmina as the first Queen regnant of the Netherlands. As a remnant of Salic law, the group of the reigning monarch of the Netherlands is always formally known as "King" even though her title may be "Queen". Luxembourg passed to the House of Orange-Nassau's distantly-related agnates, the House of Nassau-Weilburg. However, that house, too, faced extinction in the male line less than two decades later. With no other male-line agnates in the remaining branches of the house of Nassau, Grand Duke William IV adopted a semi-Salic law of succession so tht he could be succeeded by his daughters.