Philip Augustus seizes Normandy from King John

1204

After Rouen's garrison surrendered, the ancestral duchy of William the Conqueror passed from English to French hands. John Lackland earned his nickname; the Plantagenet empire west of the Channel began its long unraveling. The loss of Normandy shifted the balance of European power and forced England's barons to look inward, a frustration that would boil over at Runnymede eleven years later.