About the book: 2013 / In the history of medieval France, King Philip II Augustus (1180-1223) is one of the most striking figures - the reformer king from whom growth begins the power of the French monarchy. From the crowned ruler of a small region, Ile-de-France, Philip at the end of his reign became a powerful sovereign, tripling his possessions. In a long-term struggle with the French feudal lords, Philip turned his kingdom into an undisputed force in the political arena of Western Europe in the 13th century. The central plot of this struggle was a large-scale duel between the king and the lords from the Plantagenet dynasty, who had put together a huge empire from the English kingdom and lands in western France. It is to this battle, which lasted for decades, that Gerard Siveri devotes the best pages of his book, depicting the confrontation between Philip Augustus and the legendary English king Richard the Lionheart, the confrontation between two personalities - a calculating king-politician and a brave king-knight. However, the wars with the Plantagenets do not occupy the entire place in the presented biography of Philip Augustus: Gerard Sivery shows the French king against the backdrop of the turbulent events that shook medieval Europe at the turn of the 12th-13th centuries: the rise of the heretical movement of Southern France and the Albigensian crusade, the struggle between the papacy and the German emperor, rapid growth of cities.