CHAPTER III.

ANJOU AND BLOIS.

987–1044.

One of the wildest of the legends which have gathered round the Angevin house tells how a count of Anjou had wedded a lady of unknown origin and more than earthly beauty, who excited the suspicions of those around her by her marked dislike to entering a church, and her absolute refusal to be present at the consecration of the Host. At last her husband, urged by his friends, resolved to compel her to stay. By his order, when the Gospel was ended and she was about to leave the church as usual, she was stopped by four armed men. As they laid hold of her mantle she shook it from her shoulders; two of her little children stood beneath its folds at her right hand, two at her left. The two former she left behind, the latter she caught up in her arms, and, floating away through a window of the church, she was seen on earth no more. “What wonder,” was the comment of Richard Cœur-de-Lion upon this story; “what wonder if we lack the natural affections of mankind--we who come from the devil, and must needs go back to the devil?”[293]

[293] Girald. Cambr. _De Instr. Princ._, dist. iii. c. 27 (Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 154).

One is tempted to think that the excited brains of the closing tenth century, filled with dim presages of horror that were floating about in expectation of the speedy end of the world, must have wrought out this strange tale by way of explaining the career of Fulk the Black.[294] His contemporaries may well have reckoned him among the phenomena of the time; they may well have had recourse to a theory of supernatural agency or demoniac possession to account for the rapid developement of talents and passions which both alike seemed almost more than human. When the county of Anjou was left to him by the death of his father Geoffrey Greygown, Fulk was a child scarce eight years old.[295] Surrounded by powerful foes whom Geoffrey’s aggressions had provoked rather than checked--without an ally or protector unless it were the new king--Fulk began life with everything against him. Yet before he has reached the years of manhood the young count meets us at every turn, and always in triumph. Throughout the fifty-three years of his reign Fulk is one of the most conspicuous and brilliant figures in French history. His character seems at times strangely self-contradictory. Mad bursts of passion, which would have been the ruin of an ordinary man, but which seem scarcely to have made a break in his cool, calculating, far-seeing policy; a rapid and unerring perception of his own ends, a relentless obstinacy in pursuing them, an utter disregard of the wrong and suffering which their pursuit might involve; and then ever and anon fits of vehement repentance, ignorant, blind, fruitless as far as any lasting amendment was concerned, yet at once awe-striking and touching in its short-lived, wrong-headed earnestness--all these seeming contradictions yet make up, not a puzzling abstraction, but an intensely living character--the character, in a word, of the typical Angevin count.

[294] “Fulco Nerra” or “Niger,” “Palmerius” and “Hierosolymitanus” are his historical surnames. I can find no hint whether the first was derived from his complexion or from the colour of the armour which he usually wore (as in the case of the “Black Prince”); the origin of the two last will be seen later.

[295] This is on the supposition that Adela of Chalon was his mother; see note C to chap. ii. above.

For more than a hundred years after the accession of Hugh Capet, the history of the kingdom which he founded consists chiefly of the struggles of the great feudataries among themselves to get and to keep control over the action of the crown. The duke of the French had gained little save in name by his royal coronation and unction. He was no nearer than his Karolingian predecessors had been to actual supremacy over the Norman duchy, the Breton peninsula, and the whole of southern Gaul. Aquitaine indeed passed from cold contempt to open aggression. When one of her princes, the count of Poitou, had at length made unwilling submission to the northern king, a champion of southern independence issued from far Périgord to punish him, stormed Poitiers, marched up to the Loire, and sat down in triumph before Tours, whose count, Odo of Blois, was powerless to relieve it. The king himself could find no more practical remonstrance than the indignant question, “Who made thee count?” and the sole reply vouchsafed by Adalbert of Périgord was the fair retort, “Who made thee king?” Tours fell into his hands, and was made over, perhaps in mockery, to the youthful count of Anjou. The loyalty of its governor and citizens, however, soon restored it to its lawful owner, and Adalbert’s dreams of conquest ended in failure and retreat.[296] Still, Aquitaine remained independent as of old; Hugh’s real kingdom took in little more than the old duchy of France “between Seine and Loire”; and even within these limits it almost seemed that in grasping at the shadow of the crown he had loosened his hold on the substance of his ducal power. The regal authority was virtually a tool in the hands of whichever feudatary could secure its exercise for his own ends. As yet Aquitaine and Britanny stood aloof from the struggle; Normandy had not yet entered upon it; at present therefore it lay between the vassals of the duchy of France. Foremost among them in power, wealth, and extent of territory was the count of Blois, Chartres and Tours. His dominions pressed close against the eastern border of Anjou, and it was on her ability to cope with him that her fate chiefly depended. Was the house of Anjou or the house of Blois to win the pre-eminence in central Gaul? This was the problem which confronted Fulk the Black, and to whose solution he devoted his life. His whole course was governed by one fixed principle and directed to one paramount object--the consolidation of his marchland. To that object everything else was made subservient. Every advantage thrown in his way by circumstances, by the misfortunes, mistakes or weaknesses of foes or friends--for he used the one as unscrupulously as the other--was caught up and pursued with relentless vigour. One thread of settled policy ran through the seemingly tangled skein of his life, a thread never broken even by the wildest outbursts of his almost demoniac temper or his superstitious alarms. While he seemed to be throwing his whole energies into the occupation of the moment--whether it were the building or the besieging of a fortress, the browbeating of bishop or king, the cajoling of an ally or the crushing of a rival on the battle-field--that work was in reality only a part of a much greater work. Every town mirrored in the clear streams that water the “garden of France”--as the people of Touraine call their beautiful country--has its tale of the Black Count, the “great builder” beneath whose hands the whole lower course of the Loire gradually came to bristle with fortresses; but far above all his castles of stone and mortar there towered a castle in the air, the plan of a mighty political edifice. Every act of his life was a step towards its realization; every fresh success in his long career of triumph was another stone added to the gradual building up of Angevin dominion and greatness.

[296] Ademar of Chabanais, _Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. x. p. 146. The date seems to be about 990; but Ademar has confused Odo I. of Blois with his son Odo of Champagne.

Fulk’s first victory was won before he was fourteen, over a veteran commander who had been more than a match for his father ten years earlier. The death of Geoffrey Greygown was soon followed by that of Count Guerech of Nantes; he, too, left only a young son, Alan; and when Alan also died in 990, Conan of Rennes, already master of all the rest of Britanny, seized his opportunity to take forcible possession of Nantes,[297] little dreaming of a possible rival in his young brother-in-law beyond the Mayenne. While his back was turned and he was busy assembling troops at Bruerech, at the other end of Britanny, the Angevin worked upon the old hatred of the Nantes people to the house of Rennes; with the craft of his race he won over some of the guards, by fair words and solid bribes, till he gained admittance into the city and received oaths and hostages from its inhabitants. He then returned home to collect troops for an attack upon the citadel, which was held by Conan’s men. Conan, as soon as he heard the tidings, marched upon Nantes with all his forces; as before, he brought with him a body of Norman auxiliaries, likely to be of no small use in assaulting a place such as Nantes, whose best defence is its broad river--for the “Pirates” had not yet forgotten the days when the water was their natural element and the long keels were their most familiar home. While the Norman ships blocked the river, Conan’s troops beset the town by land, and thus, with the garrison shooting down at them from the citadel, the townsfolk of Nantes were between three fires when Fulk advanced to their rescue.[298] Conan at once sent the audacious boy a challenge to meet him, on such a day, in a pitched battle on the field of Conquereux, where ten years before a doubtful fight had been waged between Conan and Fulk’s father. This time the Bretons trusted to lure their enemies to complete destruction by a device which, in days long after, was successfully employed by Robert Bruce against the English army at Bannockburn; they dug a series of trenches right across the swampy moor, covered them with bushes, branches, leaves and thatch, supported by uprights stuck into the ditches, and strewed the surface with ferns till it was indistinguishable from the surrounding moorland. Behind this line of hidden pitfalls Conan drew up his host, making a feint of unwillingness to begin the attack. Fulk, panting for his first battle with all the ardour of youth, urged his men to the onset; the flower of the Angevin troops charged right into the Breton pitfalls; men and horses became hopelessly entangled; two thousand went down in the swampy abyss and were drowned, slaughtered or crushed to death.[299] The rest fled in disorder; Fulk himself was thrown from his horse and fell to the ground, weighed down by his armour, perhaps too heavy for his boyish frame. In an instant he was up again, wild with rage, burning to avenge his overthrow, calling furiously upon his troops. The clear, young voice of their leader revived the courage of the Angevins; “as the storm-wind sweeps down upon the thick corn-rigs”[300]--so their historian tells--they rushed upon the foe; and their momentary panic was avenged by the death of Conan and the almost total destruction of his host.[301] The blow overthrew the power of Rennes; the new duke Geoffrey, the son of Conan and Hermengard, was far indeed from being a match for his young uncle. In the flush of victory Fulk marched into Nantes; the citizens received him with open arms; the dismayed garrison speedily surrendered, and swore fealty to the conqueror; the titular bishop, Judicaël, a young son of Count Hoel, was set up as count under the guardianship of Aimeric of Thouars, a kinsman of the Angevin house, who ruled solely in Fulk’s interest;[302] while the territory on the right bank of the Mayenne, lost a century and a half before by the treason of Count Lambert, seems to have been reunited to the Angevin dominions.

[297] Morice, _Hist. de Bret._, vol. i. p. 64 (from a seemingly lost bit of the Chron. Namnet.).

[298] Richer, l. iv. c. 81.

[299] _Ib._ cc. 82–85. Rudolf Glaber, l. ii. c. 3 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. x. p. 15).

[300] R. Glaber, l. ii. c. 3 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. x. p. 15).

[301] Richer, l. iv. c. 86. R. Glaber (as above) says that Conan was not slain, but only taken prisoner with the loss of his right hand--a confusion with the first battle of Conquereux. Conan’s death appears in all the chief Breton chronicles, especially Chron. S. Michael. a. 992 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. x. p. 175), etc. See also Fulk Rechin (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 377. The _Gesta Cons._ copy R. Glaber.

[302] Richer, l. iv. c. 86. The first viscount of Thouars, a brother of Ebles, count of Poitou, had married Roscilla, daughter of Fulk the Red. Chron. Com. Pictaviæ in _Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. x. pp. 294, 295.

The boy count had well won his spurs on the field of Conquereux. With the control over Nantes he had secured the control over the whole course of the Loire from his own capital down to the sea--a most important advantage in an age when the water-ways were the principal channels of communication, whether for peace or war. The upper part of the Loire valley, its richest and most fertile part, was in the hands of the count of Blois. But his sway was not unbroken. Midway between his two capitals, Blois and Tours, stood Amboise, the heritage of the Red Count’s mother; farther south, in the valley of the Indre, stood Loches, the heritage of his wife. It was not in human nature--certainly not in Angevin nature--that the owner of Amboise and Loches should not seek to extend his power a little further at the expense of his neighbour in Touraine; and no great provocation on the part of Odo of Blois was needed to make the fiery young Angevin dash into his territories, and ride plundering, wasting and burning to the outskirts of Blois itself.[303] Raid and counter-raid went on almost without ceasing, and once it seems that King Hugh himself came to help his Angevin ally.[304] In 995 Odo died, and his widow, Bertha, shortly afterwards married Robert of France, who next year became king on the death of his father Hugh Capet. Robert and Bertha were cousins; the Church pronounced their marriage illegal, and punished it with an interdict on the realm; amid the general confusion which followed, Fulk carried on a desultory warfare with Odo’s two elder sons, Thierry and Theobald, till the death of the latter in 1004 brought him face to face with his lifelong antagonist, Odo II. The contest made inevitable by circumstances was to be rendered all the more bitter by the character of the two men who were now to engage in it. Odo, indeed, was even yet scarcely more than a boy;[305] but, like Fulk, he had begun his public career at a very early age. His beginning was as characteristic as Fulk’s beginning at Conquereux. In 999 he openly insulted his royal step-father by wresting the castle of Melun from Robert’s most trusty counsellor, Count Burchard of Vendôme; and no might short of that of the Norman duke, who had now grown from a “leader of the Pirates” into the king’s most valued supporter, sufficed to avenge the outrage.[306] The boy’s hasty, unprovoked spoliation of Burchard, his insolent defiance of the king, his overweening self-confidence, ending suddenly in ignominious flight, were typical of his whole after-career. Odo’s life was as busy and active as Fulk’s, but his activity produced no lasting effects. His insatiable ambition lacked the restraint and regulation of the Angevin practical sagacity, and ran hopelessly to seed without bringing forth any lasting fruit. There was no fixed purpose in his life. New ideas, daring schemes, sprang up in his brain almost as quickly as in that of Fulk; but he never waited till they were matured; he never stopped to count their cost; and instead of working together to one common end, they only drove him into a multiplicity of irreconcileable and often visionary undertakings which never came to perfection. He was entirely a creature of impulse; always ready to throw himself into a new project, but generally lacking patience and perseverance enough to carry it through; harassed by numberless conflicting cares;[307] breaking every engagement as soon as made, not from any deep-laid policy, but simply from sheer inability to keep long to anything. “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel,” might have been the burthen of Odo and of Odo’s whole race. The house of Blois failed through their utter lack of the quality which was the main strength of their rivals: thoroughness. The rivalry and the characters of the two houses have a bearing upon English history; for the quarrel that began between them for the possession of Touraine was to be fought out at last on English ground, and for no less a stake than the crown of England. The rivalry of Odo and Fulk was a foreshadowing of the rivalry between Stephen of Blois and Henry of Anjou. The end was the same in both cases. With every advantage on their side, in the eleventh century as in the twelfth, in Gaul as in England, the aimless activity of the house of Blois only spent itself against the indomitable steadiness, determination and persistency of the Angevins, as vainly as the storm-wind might beat upon the rocky foundations of Black Angers.

[303] Richer, l. iv. c. 79.

[304] Richer, l. iv. cc. 90–94. His account of the war, and indeed his whole account of Fulk and of Odo, is extremely strange and confused; it has been examined by M. Léon Aubineau in a “Notice sur Thibaut-le-Tricheur et Eudes I.” in the _Mém. de la Soc. Archéol. de Touraine_, vol. iii. (1845–1847), pp. 41–94, but the result is far from convincing.

[305] He is called “puerulus” at the time of his mother’s second marriage, _i.e._ in 995–996. _Hist. Franc. Fragm._ in _Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. x. p. 211. But considering the date of the Melun affair, this can hardly be taken literally.

[306] _Vita Burchardi_, in _Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. x. pp. 354, 355. Will. Jumièges, l. v. c. 14 (_ib._ p. 189; Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._, p. 255). Richer, l. iv. cc. 74–78. See note A at the end of chapter.

[307] See the character given of him by R. Glaber, l. iii. cc. 2, 9 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. x. pp. 27, 40).

In the ten years of misery and confusion which followed the death of Odo I. and the re-marriage of his widow, Fulk had time nearly to complete a chain of fortresses which, starting from Angers and sweeping along the line of Geoffrey Greygown’s Poitevin conquests in a wide irregular half-circle up again to Amboise, served the double purpose of linking his own outlying possessions in Touraine with his head-quarters in Anjou, and of cutting in halves the dominions of his neighbour. The towers of Montreuil, Passavant and Maulévrier, of Loudun and the more remote Mirebeau, were a standing menace to Saumur and Chinon. Sᵗᵉ·-Maure was an eyesore to the garrison of Ile-Bouchard.[308] Farther east, on a pile of rock with the little blue Indre winding round its foot, rose, as it rises still in ruined majesty, the mighty keep of Loches; and on the banks of the Indrois that of Montrésor, whose lord, Roger, rejoiced in the surname of “the devil.”[309] To Roger Fulk also intrusted the command of another great fortress, Montrichard, whose dark donjon frowned down upon the Cher from a plot of ground stolen from the metropolitan see of Tours.[310] At Amboise itself, the site of the Roman governor’s palace--now crowned by the modern castle--was occupied by a strong _domicilium_ of the Angevin count,[311] and the place was a perpetual obstacle between the archiepiscopal city of S. Martin and the secular capital of its rulers. Langeais and Montbazon, which for a while threatened Tours more closely still, were soon wrested from their daring builder;[312] but the whole course of the Indre above Montbazon was none the less in Fulk’s hands, for either by force or guile, the lords of all the castles on its banks had been won over to his cause; he had gained a foothold on every one of the affluents of the Loire upon its southern side; while on the north, in the valley of the Loir, Hugh of Alluye, the lord of Château-la-Vallière and St.-Christophe, was so devoted to the Angevin interest that the count’s usual route to and from Amboise lay through his lands.[313]

[308] Fulk Rechin (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 377.

[309] _Gesta Cons._ (_ibid._), p. 107; _Gesta Amb. Domin._ (_ibid._), p. 167.

[310] _Gesta Cons._, as above.

[311] _Gesta Amb. Domin._ (as above), p. 175.

[312] That Montbazon was built by Fulk appears by a charter of King Robert (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. x. pp. 577, 578), date seemingly about A.D. 1000. It had, however, passed into Odo’s hands. Langeais, whose building is recorded by Fulk Rechin (as above), was probably taken by Odo I. in 995; there is a charter of his dated “at the siege of Langeais” in that year. Mabillon, _Ann. Bened._, vol. iv. p. 96.

[313] _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 91. _Gesta Amb. Domin._ (_ibid._), p. 164.

The early part of the eleventh century was an age of castle-building; Fulk, however, had begun his line of fortifications before the century dawned, in those gloomy years of interdict when the royal power was at its lowest ebb, when the people, cut off from the helps and comforts of religion, lay in hopeless anarchy and misery, and half in terror, half in longing, men whispered to each other that the end of the world was near. The superstitious terrors which paralyzed gentler souls only goaded Fulk into more restless activity and inflamed his fierce temper almost to madness. He had married the heiress of Vendôme, the daughter of Count Burchard;[314] but this union came to a terrible end while its only child was still in her cradle. In the very dawn of the dreaded year 1000 Countess Elizabeth expiated her real or supposed sins as a wife by death at the stake; and a conflagration which destroyed a large part of the city of Angers immediately after her execution may well have caused the horror-stricken subjects of her husband to deem that judgement was indeed at their gates.[315]

[314] They were already married in 990; see a charter in Mabillon, _Ann. Bened._, vol. iv. p. 59.

[315] This, or something like it, must be the meaning of the not very intelligible accounts given in the Angevin chronicles of the death of Elizabeth and the fire which followed it. “Incensa est urbs Andegavensis post incensionem Comitissæ Elizabeth.” Chron. S. Michael. in Peric. Maris, a. 1000 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. x. p. 175). “Prima incensio urbis Andegavæ, quæ evenit paucis diebus post combustionem comitissæ Helisabeth.” Chron. S. Albin., a. 1000 (Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 22). “Urbs Andecava incensa est post combustionem comitissæ Elisabeth.” Breve Chron. S. Flor. Salm. a. 999 (_ib._ p. 187). “Fulco ... cum Elysabeth conjugem suam Andegavis, post immane præcipitium salvatam, occidisset, ipsamque urbem paucis defendentibus flammarum incendiis concremâsset.” _Hist. S. Flor. Salm._ (_ibid._), p. 273. Cf. _ib._ p. 260.

After the paroxysm came the reaction. When the dreaded year had passed over and the world found itself still alive; when the king had at last consented to purchase relief from the interdict by parting from his beloved Bertha, and the nation was rousing itself to welcome the new queen who stepped into Bertha’s place; then the blood which he had shed at Conquereux and elsewhere--one may surely add, the ashes of his wife--began to weigh heavily on the Black Count’s soul; “the fear of Gehenna” took possession of him, and leaving the marchland to the care of his brother Maurice he set out for the Holy Sepulchre.[316] This journey was the first link in a chain which, through the later pilgrimages of Fulk Nerra himself and those of his great-grandson Fulk V., brought the counts of Anjou into a specially intimate relation with the Holy Land and led to the establishment of an Angevin dynasty upon its throne. Legend has not been slack to furnish Fulk the Palmer with characteristic adventures, to tell how his craft outwitted that of the Turks who tried to exclude him from the Sepulchre, and how he not only procured a piece of the true Cross, but while kissing the sacred stone in the fervour of his devotion, detected a loose fragment which he managed to bite off and bring home as the most precious trophy of his journey.[317] His first care on his return was to build an abbey for the reception of this relic. From the rocky angle by the winding Indre where the great “Square Tower”--as the natives emphatically call the keep of Loches--was rising in picturesque contrast to a church reared by Geoffrey Greygown in honour of our Lady,[318] the land which the wife of the first count of Anjou had transmitted to her descendants stretched a mile eastward beyond the river in a broad expanse of green meadow to a waste plot of ground full of broom, belonging to a man named Ingelger. From its original Latin name, _Belli-locus_, now corrupted into Beaulieu, it seems possible that the place was set apart for trials by ordeal of battle.[319]

[316] R. Glaber, l. ii. c. 3 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. x. p. 15). On the regency of Maurice see note C at end of chapter, and Mabille, Introd. _Comtes d’Anjou_, p. lxxvi.

[317] _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), pp. 102, 103. There is a versified account of the pious theft in the Beaulieu office of the Holy Sepulchre, Salies, _Hist. de Foulques-Nerra_, p. 529.

[318] In 963; Chron. Turon. Abbrev. ad ann. (Salmon, _Chron. de Touraine_, p. 185). From the foundation-charter, cited by M. l’abbé Bardet (_La Collégiale de Loches_, p. 8), it seems that Geoffrey founded the church on his return from a pilgrimage to Rome. A fragment of his work possibly remains in the present church (now called S. Ours), which was built by the historian-prior, Thomas Pactius, in the time of Henry II.

[319] This is a remark quoted by M. de Salies (_Foulques-Nerra_, pp. 115, 361) from Dufour, “Dict. hist. de l’arrond. de Loches,” and grounded on the fact that while the many other Beaulieus, in France and in England, all appear in Latin as “_Bellus_-locus,” this one is “_Belli_-locus” in its foundation charter. See a similar case of verbal corruption below, p. 187.

This field Fulk determined to purchase for the site of his abbey. A bargain was struck; the count paid down the stipulated sum, carried the former owner on his shoulders from the middle of the field to the foot of the bridge, and there set him down, saying, “A man without wit his freehold must quit”--by which ceremony the contract was completed.[320] Despite his fiery haste, Fulk did all things with due method,[321] and his next anxiety was to decide upon the dedication of his intended minster. He found his best counsellor in his newly-married wife, the Lady Hildegard, and by her advice the church was placed under the direct invocation, not of saint or angel, but of the most Holy Trinity Itself.[322] By the time it stood ready for consecration the son of Fulk and Hildegard was nearly three years old:[323] he had been nursed by a blacksmith’s wife at Loches;[324] and many a time, as the count and countess went to inspect the progress of architect and builder in the meadow beyond the river, they must have lingered beside the forge to mark the growth of their little Geoffrey, the future conqueror of Tours. The consecration of the church proved a difficulty; the archbishop of Tours refused to perform it unless Fulk would restore to his see the stolen land of Montrichard.[325] Fulk swore--doubtless his customary oath, “by God’s souls”[326]--that he would get the better of the primate, and went straight off to Rome to lay his case before the Pope. After several years’ wrangling it was decided in his favour,[327] and one morning in May 1012 the abbey-church of the Holy Trinity at Beaulieu was hallowed with all due pomp and solemnity by a Roman cardinal-legate. But though Rome had spoken, the case was not ended yet. That very afternoon a sudden storm of wind blew up from the south, whirled round the church, and swept the whole roof completely off. Clergy and laity alike seized on the prodigy as an evident token of Heaven’s wrath against the insolence and presumption of Fulk;[328] not so the Black Count himself, who simply replaced the roof and pushed on the completion of the monastic buildings as if nothing had happened.[329] He had successfully defied the Church; he next ventured to defy the king and the count of Blois both at once. The divorced queen Bertha, mother of young Odo of Blois, still lived and was still loved by the king; Fulk, if he was not actually, as tradition relates, a kinsman of the new Queen Constance,[330] was at any rate fully alive to the policy of making common cause with her against their common rivals of Blois. He crushed King Robert’s last hope of reunion with Bertha by sending twelve armed men to assassinate at a hunting-party, before his royal master’s eyes, the king’s seneschal or _comes palatii_ Hugh of Beauvais who was the confidant of his cherished scheme.[331] It is a striking proof not only of the royal helplessness but also of the independence and security which Fulk had already attained that his crime went altogether unpunished and even uncensured save by one bishop,[332] and almost immediately after its commission he could again venture on leaving his dominions under the regency of his brother Maurice, while he set off upon another long journey which the legendary writers of Anjou, by some strange confusion between their own hero and the Emperor Otto III., make into a mission of knight-errantry to deliver the Pope from a tyrant named Crescentius, but which seems really to have been a second pilgrimage to Holy Land.[333] He came back to find the storm which had so long been gathering on his eastern border on the point of breaking at last.

[320] 11th lesson of the Beaulieu Office, Salies, _Foulques-Nerra_, p. 528. “Stultus a proprio expellitur alodo.”

[321] “Ut semper curiose agebat,” R. Glaber, l. ii. c. 4 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. x. p. 15).

[322] _Ibid._ (pp. 15, 16).

[323] He was born October 14, 1006, according to Chronn. Vindoc. and S. Flor. Salm. ad ann. (Marchegay, _Eglises_, pp. 164, 187). The Chron. S. Serg. (_ib._ p. 134) gives the same day, but makes the year 1007; the Chron. S. Maxent. (_ib._ p. 387) places the event on April 12, 1005. The Chron. S. Albin. (_ib._ p. 22) gives no day, but confirms the two first-named authorities for the year, 1006.

[324] _Hist. S. Flor. Salm._ (Marchegay, _Eglises_), p. 260.

[325] R. Glaber, as above (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. x. p. 16). Cf. _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_, p. 107).

[326] “Fulco Nerra, cui consuetudo fuit Animas Dei jurare,” begins his history in the _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 89.

[327] R. Glaber, l. ii. c. 4 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. x. p. 17). See also a bull of Pope John XVIII. in Migne’s _Patrologia_, vol. cxxxix., cols. 1491, 1492; and two of Sergius IV., _ib._ cols. 1525–1527.

[328] R. Glaber, as above (p. 16).

[329] _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 99. This writer copies the whole story of Beaulieu from R. Glaber.

[330] See note B at end of chapter.

[331] R. Glaber, l. iii. c. 2 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. x. p. 27).

[332] Fulbert of Chartres; see his letter to Fulk, _Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. x. pp. 476, 477.

[333] See note C at end of chapter.

The adherents of the count of Blois, headed by Landry of Châteaudun, had profited by Fulk’s absence to concert a scheme for the expulsion of the Angevins from Touraine. In spite of a vigorous resistance made by Fulk’s lieutenant at Amboise, Sulpice, treasurer of S. Martin’s at Tours, they seemed in a fair way to succeed, when Fulk himself dropped like a thunderbolt in their midst, dashed right through the county of Blois into that of Chartres, punished Landry by sacking Châteaudun and harrying the surrounding district, and marched home in triumph to Amboise.[334] A raid such as this was a distinct declaration of war, not upon Landry, but upon Landry’s lord. Fulk had intended it as such, and he went home to set in action every possible means that could gain him help and support in a fight to the uttermost with Odo for the possession of Touraine. At that very moment the county of Maine was thrown virtually into his hands by the death of its aged count Hugh; with the alliance of Hugh’s youthful successor he secured the northern frontier of Touraine and the support of a body of valiant fighting-men whose co-operation soon proved to be of the highest value and importance. The rapid insight which singled out at a glance the most fitting instruments for his purpose, the gifts of attraction and persuasion by which he knew how to attach men to his service, and seemed almost to inspire them with some faint reflex of his own spirit, while making them devoted creatures of his will, were all brought into play as he cast about in all directions for aid in the coming struggle, and were strikingly shown in his choice of a lieutenant. The instinct of genius told him that he had found the man he wanted in young Lisoy, lord of the castle of Bazogers, in Maine. As prudent in counsel as he was daring in fight, Lisoy was a man after Fulk’s own heart; they understood each other at once; Lisoy was appointed to share with the now aged Sulpice the supreme command of Loches and Amboise; and while Sulpice provided for the defence of Amboise by building on his own land there a lofty tower of stone,[335] the burned and plundered districts of St.-Aignan, Chaumont and Blois soon had cause to know that the “pride of Cenomannian knighthood” had thrown himself heart and soul into the service of the count of Anjou.[336]

[334] _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), pp. 88, 89–91.

[335] _Gesta Amb. Domin._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 169.

[336] _Ib._ pp. 160–164.

The crisis came in the summer of 1016, when Odo of Blois gathered all his forces for an attack upon Montrichard. His rival was fully prepared to meet him. Before he set out from Blois, the allied hosts of Anjou and Maine had assembled at Amboise, and thence separated again to post themselves in such a manner as to render a battle unavoidable. Fulk turned eastward, and took up a position close to Pontlevoy, seemingly in a wood now known as the Bois-Royal, which in that day was skirted by the high road from Blois to Montrichard. Herbert of Maine rode down to the banks of the Cher, and pitched his camp just above Montrichard, at Bourré.[337] If Odo followed the high road he would be met by the Angevins; if he contrived to turn their position by taking a less direct route to the eastward, he must encounter the Cenomannians, with the garrison of Montrichard at their back; while whichever engaged him first, the distance between the two bodies of troops was so slight that either could easily come to the other’s assistance. It was well for Anjou and for her count that his strategical arrangements were so perfect, and so faithfully carried out by his young ally; for never in all his long life, save in the panic at Conquereux, was Fulk the Black so near to complete overthrow as on that Friday morning in July 1016, when he met Odo of Blois face to face in the battle-field.

[337] _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 107. The topography of the battle of Pontlevoy is cleared up by Salies, _Foulques-Nerra_, p. 175 _et seq._

Odo, who always trusted to be saved by the multitude of an host,[338] was greatly astonished, on arriving with all his forces opposite Pontlevoy, to find the Angevins drawn up against him in battle array. With a few hurried words he urged his men to the onset. Fortune seemed for a while to favour the stronger side; Fulk and his troops were sore bested; Fulk himself was thrown from his horse and severely stunned, and the fate of Anjou hung trembling in the balance, when the scale was turned by the sword of Herbert of Maine. A messenger hurried off to tell the Cenomannian count that his friend was defeated, nay, captured. Herbert and his knights flew to the rescue; they charged the left wing of the enemies with a vigour which changed the whole position of affairs, and snatched from the count of Blois the victory he had all but won; the chivalry of Blois fled in confusion, leaving the foot to be cut to pieces at will, and their camp to be plundered by the victorious allies, who returned in triumph to Amboise, laden with rich spoils and valuable prisoners.[339]

[338] “More suo, nimiâ multitudine confisus.” _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 107.

[339] _Ib._ pp. 107, 108. The date--July 6--is given in Chronn. S. Serg., Vindoc. and S. Flor. Salm., a. 1016 (Marchegay, _Eglises_, pp. 134, 164, 187). There is an account of the battle in _Hist. S. Flor. Salm._ (_ib._), p. 274, but it has a very impossible look.

The victory of Pontlevoy was the turning-point of Fulk’s career. Nine years passed away before Odo recovered from the check enough to make any attempt to avenge it. It seems at first glance strange that Fulk did not employ the interval in pushing forward his conquest of Touraine. But in the eyes of both Fulk and Odo the possession of Touraine was in reality a means rather than an end; and a sort of armed truce, so long as Odo did not provoke him to break it, suited Fulk’s purpose better than a continued war. His western frontier had been secured by his first victory at Conquereux; his eastern frontier was now secured, at any rate for a time, by his victory at Pontlevoy; from the south there was nothing to fear, for the duke of Aquitaine, to whom he owed homage for Loudun, was his staunch friend, and presently gave proof of his friendship by bestowing on him the city of Saintes.[340] Fulk at once made use of the gift as a means of extorting something yet more valuable from a neighbour to whom he owed a far deeper obligation--Herbert of Maine. It may be that they had quarrelled since the days of Pontlevoy; it may be that Herbert had begun that career of nocturnal raids against the fortified towns of Anjou which scared men and beasts from their rest, and gained him his unclassical but expressive surname of “Wake-the-dog.”[341] If so, the wily Angevin took effectual measures to stop them. He enticed the count of Maine to pay him a visit at Saintes, proposing to grant him the investiture of that city. Suddenly, in the midst of conversation, Herbert was seized by Fulk’s servants and flung into prison, whence he was only released at the end of two years, and on submission to such conditions as Fulk chose to dictate.[342] What those conditions were history does not tell; but there can be little doubt that they included some acknowledgment of the suzerain rights of Anjou over Maine, with which Geoffrey Greygown had been invested by Hugh Capet, but which he had not had time to make good, and which Fulk had only enforced for a moment, at the sword’s point, when the aged count Hugh was dying.[343] Fulk’s dealings with Maine are only an episode in his life; but they led even more directly than his struggle with the house of Blois to consequences of the utmost importance. They paved the way for an Angevin conquest of Maine which extended the Angevin power to the Norman border, brought it into contact and collision with the Norman ducal house, and originated the long wars which were ended at last by the marriage of Geoffrey Plantagenet and the Empress Matilda. The imprisonment of Herbert is really the first step in the path which leads from Anjou to England.

[340] Ademar of Chabanais, _Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. x. p. 149.

[341] “Vulgo, sed parum Latine, cognominari Evigilans-canem pro ingenti probitate promeruit. Nam ... in eundem [sc. Fulconem] arma levans nocturnas expeditiones crebro agebat, et Andegavenses homines et canes in ipsâ urbe, vel in munitioribus oppidis terrebat, et horrendis assultibus pavidos vigilare cogebat.” Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._) p. 532. It is however only fair to add that in another place (_ib._ p. 487) Orderic says Herbert “vulgo Evigilans-canem cognominabatur, propter gravissimas infestationes quas a perfidis affinibus suis Andegavensibus incessanter patiebatur”--as if he kept the Cenomannian dogs awake to give notice of the enemy’s approach, we must suppose.

[342] Ademar of Chabanais (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. x.), p. 161; Will. Poitiers (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 189; Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. iii. c. 235 (Hardy, p. 401). Ademar says Herbert’s imprisonment lasted two years; and the Chronn. S. Albin. and Vindoc. a. 1027 (Marchegay, _Eglises_, pp. 22, 167), give us the date of his release, by giving that of the Breton invasion which followed it.

[343] “Hugonis ... quem Fulco senior sibi violentur subjugârat.” Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 532. The terms of Herbert’s submission to Fulk are matter of inference from what followed his release. He at once began to quarrel with Avesgaud, the bishop of Le Mans, and being by him defied and excommunicated, called in the help of Duke Alan of Britanny (_Acta Pontif. Cenoman._, c. 30, in Mabillon, _Vet. Analecta_, p. 304). Alan, when he had helped to defeat the bishop, marched down to besiege Le Lude, one of the chief Angevin fortresses on the Cenomannian border, and only desisted when he had extorted from Fulk the hostages given him by Herbert on his release; Chron. Vindoc. a. 1027 (Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 166). It is not hard to see why the rival overlord of Nantes should be ready to make war, on any pretext, upon the count of Anjou; but, making due allowance for Fulk’s possible difficulties--Odo’s last attack occurred in this year--still it is very hard to see why Fulk, “the ingenious Fulk,” as the writer of the _Gesta Amb. Domin._ calls him (Marchegay, _Comtes_, p. 165), could find no better way of raising the siege of a petty border-fortress than by making restitution to Herbert at the bidding of Alan, unless he felt so sure of his hold over Herbert as not to think the hostages worth keeping. The striking resemblance between Fulk’s treatment of Herbert and his father’s treatment of Guerech also suggests that there was probably a like resemblance in the terms of release.

But the step could never have been followed up as it was by Fulk’s successor had not Fulk himself at once turned back to his special work of clearing away the obstacle to Angevin progress formed by the rivalry of Blois, which once again threatened to become a serious danger in the very year of Herbert’s capture. Odo had lately[344] succeeded to the inheritance of his cousin Stephen, count of Champagne, an acquisition which doubled his wealth and power, and gave him a position of such importance in the French kingdom as enabled him to overawe the crown and cause a complete change in its policy. In 1025 King Robert, “or rather his queen Constance,” as the chroniclers significantly add, made peace with Count Odo who had hitherto been their enemy, and left their old friend Fulk of Anjou to carry on alone the struggle which he had begun with their good will, and, ostensibly at least, partly in their interest.[345] Odo thought his hour was come; “with all his might he set upon” Fulk;[346] and his might now included all the forces of Touraine, Blois, Chartres and Champagne, aided, it seems, by a contingent from the Royal Domain itself.[347] With this formidable host Odo laid siege to a great fortified camp known as the Montboyau, which Fulk had reared some ten years before on the northern bank of the Loire almost opposite Tours, as a standing menace to the city and a standing defiance to its ruler.[348] Fulk, to whom the besieged garrison appealed for succour, had advanced[349] as far as Brain-sur-Alonnes when he was met by tidings which induced him to change his course.[350] Nearly over against the spot where he stood, a ridge of white chalk-cliff rising sheer above the southern bank of the Loire was crowned by the fortress of Saumur, the south-western key of Touraine, close to the Angevin border. It had belonged to the counts of Tours since the days of Theobald the Trickster at least; but in an earlier time it had probably formed a part of the Angevin March, as it still formed a part of the diocese of Angers. Its lord, Gelduin, was the sole human being whom the Black Count feared; “Let us flee that devil of Saumur!” was his cry, “I seem always to see him before me.”[351] But now he learned that Gelduin had joined his count at the siege of the Montboyau. A hurried night-ride across Loire and Vienne brought Fulk at break of day to the gates of Saumur,[352] and before sunset he was master of the place, although its inhabitants, with a spirit worthy of their absent leader, fired the town before they surrendered, and only admitted the victors into a heap of ashes. Not the least valiant of its defenders had been the monks of S. Florence, a little community who dwelt within the castle-enclosure, keeping guard over the relics of a famous local saint. As they came forth with their patron’s body from the blazing ruins, the Black Count’s voice rose above the din: “Let the fire burn, holy Florence! I will build thee a better dwelling at Angers.” The relics were placed in a boat and rowed down the stream till they reached the limit of the lands of Saumur, at Trèves. Once the boundary had been further west, at Gennes; till Fulk, despite his terror of the “devil,” had taken courage to march against him, doubtless at a moment when Gelduin was unprepared for defence, for he at once asked a truce. It was granted, but not exactly as he desired; on the spot where Gelduin’s envoy met him Fulk planted a castle and called it mockingly “Treva,” _truce_. Opposite this alien fortress the boat which carried the relics of S. Florence now stuck fast in one of the sandbanks of treacherous Loire, and all the efforts of the rowers failed to move it. The saint--said the monks--was evidently determined not to be carried beyond his own territory. Fulk, who was superintending the voyage in person, began to rail at him as “an impious rustic who would not allow himself to be well treated”: but there was a grain of humour in the Black Count’s composition, and he was probably as much amused as angered at the saint’s obstinacy; at any rate he suffered the monks to push off in the opposite direction--which they did without difficulty--and deposit their charge in the church of S. Hilary, an old dependency of their house, till he should find them a suitable place for a new monastery.[353] Thus far Odo’s grand expedition had brought him nothing but the loss of the best stronghold he possessed on the Angevin border. There was apparently nothing to prevent Fulk from marching in triumph up the valley of the Vienne, where Chinon and Ile-Bouchard now held out alone for the count of Blois amid a ring of Angevin fortresses. His present object, however, was to relieve the Montboyau; and turning northward he laid siege to a castle of his own building which had somehow passed into the enemy’s hands, Montbazon[354] on the Indre, only three leagues distant from Tours. Odo, whose siege operations had proved a most disastrous failure,[355] at once broke up his camp and marched to the relief of Montbazon. To dislodge him from the siege of Montboyau was all that Fulk wanted; simulating flight, he retreated up the valley to Loches and thence retired gradually upon Amboise.[356] A month later Odo made an ineffectual attempt to regain Saumur. Some time afterwards he tried again, pitching his tents among the vineyards on the banks of the Thouet, hard by the rising walls of the new abbey of S. Florence; the monks acted as mediators between their former lord and their new patron, and peace was made, Odo definitely relinquishing Saumur, and Fulk agreeing to raze the Montboyau[357]--that is, to raze the keep on its summit; for the white chalky slopes of the mighty earthwork itself rise gleaming above the river to this day. The struggle between Fulk and Odo was virtually over. Once again, in the following year, the count of Blois attempted to surprise Amboise, in company with the young King Henry, Robert’s son and recently crowned colleague. The attack failed;[358] it was Odo’s last effort to stem the tide of Angevin progress. Fulk had done more than beat his rival in the battle-field; he had out-generalled him in every way, and won a triumph which made the final issue of their rivalry a foregone conclusion. That issue he never sought to hasten, for with all his fiery vehemence Fulk knew how to wait; unlike Odo, he could look beyond the immediate future, beyond the horizon of his own life, and having sown and watered his seed he could be content to leave others to gather its fruit, rather than risk the frustration of his labours by plucking at it before the time.

[344] Stephen seems to have died in 1019; _Art de vérifier les dates_, vol. xi. p. 347.

[345] Chron. Rain. Andeg. a. 1026 (Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 10); Chron. Vindoc. a. 1025 (_ib._ p. 165). This last is probably the right date, as the Angevin capture of Saumur, which follows, is dated in 1026 by the Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. (_ib._ pp. 22, 134), and in 1025 by the Chronn. S. Flor. Salm. and S. Maxent. (_ib._ pp. 187, 388).

[346] “Totis nisibus adorsus est.” Chronn. Rain. Andeg. and Vindoc. as above.

[347] “Cum _Francis_,” says the _Hist. S. Flor. Salm._ (Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 276). This writer afterwards speaks of Odo’s whole host as “Franci.” He has already done the same at Pontlevoy (_ib._ p. 274); but surely there cannot have been any royal vassals fighting under Odo there. What can be the writer’s real meaning?

[348] _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 108. _Gesta Amb. Domin._ (_ibid._), p. 165. See, for dates, Chron. Rain. Andeg. a. 1026 (Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 10).

[349] The _Gesta Amb. Domin._ (as above), p. 165, say that Fulk was accompanied by Herbert of Maine. But, on calculating dates, it seems that Herbert must have been by this time in prison. It is however highly probable that Cenomannian troops would be supplied to Fulk by Bishop Avesgaud.

[350] _Hist. S. Flor. Salm._ (Marchegay, _Eglises_), p. 276.

[351] _Ib._ p. 275.

[352] _Hist. S. Flor. Salm._ (Marchegay, _Eglises_), p. 276.--“Ligerique _ac Vigennâ_ transvadatis.” The writer, living close to the spot, can hardly have mistaken its topography; but unless he has done so, the confluence of the Vienne and the Loire must at that time have been considerably farther west than at present; it is now at Candes, some distance to the east of Saumur and Brain.

[353] _Hist. S. Flor. Salm._ (Marchegay, _Eglises_), pp. 276–278.

[354] _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 109. _Gesta Amb. Domin._ (_ibid._), p. 165.

[355] Chron. Rain. Andeg. a. 1026 (Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 10).

[356] _Gesta Cons._ and _Gesta Amb. Domin._ as above.

[357] _Hist. S. Flor. Salm._ (Marchegay, _Eglises_), p. 280.

[358] Chron. Vindoc. a. 1027 (_ib._ p. 165). Cf. Chron. S. Albin. a. 1027 (_ib._ p. 22).

Fulk was now at the height of his prosperity. He had been count of Anjou for forty years, and his reign had been one of unbroken success. Each in turn of the greater neighbours who had stood, a threatening ring, around Geoffrey Greygown’s boy-heir had been successfully dealt with in some way or other, till the little Marchland had grown to be a power in the realm second only to Normandy and perhaps to Aquitaine; and before Fulk’s reign closed, even Aquitaine, the only one of Anjou’s immediate neighbours which had not had to bow before him, fell prostrate at the feet of his son. Fulk’s last years were to be years of peace. Only once again did he take part in the general affairs of the French kingdom; and then, as ever, his action was in strict accord with the policy which he had begun and which his descendants followed consistently down to the time of Henry Fitz-Empress: a policy of steady loyalty to the lawful authority of the French Crown, against which the counts of Blois lived in perpetual opposition. After Robert’s death, in 1031, Fulk appeared in the unexpected character of peace-maker between Queen Constance and her son, the young King Henry, whom she was trying to oust from his throne;[359] and he afterwards accompanied Henry on an expedition to dislodge Odo of Champagne from Sens, which however succeeded no better than the attempt once made by Odo and Henry to dislodge Fulk himself from Amboise.[360] But peace or war, it mattered not to the Black Count; he was never at a loss for work. When there was no enemy to fight or to outwit, his versatile energies flung themselves just as readily into the encouragement of piety or the improvement and embellishment of his capital. Over the black bastions of the castle with which the French King Philip Augustus, when he had wrested Angers from a degenerate descendant of its ancient counts, found it needful to secure his hold on “this contemptuous city,” there still looks out upon the river a fragment of a ruined hall, chiefly of red flintstone; it is the sole remains of the dwelling-place of Fulk Nerra--in all likelihood, his own work.[361] A poetic legend shows him to us for once quietly at home, standing in that hall and gazing at the view from its windows. At his feet flowed the purple Mayenne between its flat but green meadows--for the great suburb beyond the river did not yet exist--winding down beneath a bridge of his own building to join the Loire beyond the rising hills to the south-west. His eyes, keen as those of the “Falcon” whose name he bore, reached across river and meadow to the slope of a hill directly opposite him, where he descried a dove flying to and fro, picking up fragments of earth and depositing them in a cavity which it seemed to be trying to fill. Struck by the bird’s action, he carefully marked the spot, and the work of the dove was made the foundation-stone of a great abbey in honour of S. Nicolas, which he had vowed to build as a thank-offering for deliverance from a storm at sea on his return from his second pilgrimage.[362] This abbey, with a nunnery founded near it eight years later--in 1128--by his countess Hildegard, on the site of an ancient church dedicated to our Lady of Charity,[363] became the nucleus round which gathered in after-years a suburb known as Ronceray, scarcely less important than the city itself. These tranquil home-occupations, however, could not long satisfy the restless temper of Fulk. The irresistible charm exercised by the Holy Land over so many of the more imaginative spirits of the age drew him to revisit it in 1035. One interesting event of the journey is recorded: his meeting at Constantinople with Duke Robert of Normandy, father of William the Conqueror.[364] The old and the young penitent completed their pilgrimage together; but only the former lived to see his home again; and when he reached it, he found the gates of Angers shut in his face by his own son. The rebellion was soon quelled. Saddled and bridled like a beast of burthen, Geoffrey came crawling to his father’s feet. “Conquered art thou--conquered, conquered!” shouted the old count, kicking his prostrate son. “Aye, conquered by thee, for thou art my father; but unconquered by all beside!” The spirited answer touched Fulk’s paternal pride, and Geoffrey arose forgiven.[365] The power which he had thus undutifully tried to usurp was soon to be his by right; not, however, till the Black Count had given one last proof that neither his hand nor his brain had yet forgotten its cunning. Odo of Champagne had long ago left Touraine to its fate, and for the last four years he had been absorbed in a visionary attempt to wrest from the Emperor Conrad II., first the kingdom of Burgundy, then that of Italy, and at last the imperial crown itself; while Fulk’s conquests of the valleys of the Indre and the Cher had been completed by the acquisition of Montbazon and St.-Aignan.[366] When at the close of 1037 tidings came that Odo had been defeated and slain in a battle with the imperial forces at Bar, the Angevin at once laid siege to Langeais, and took it.[367] One more stronghold still remained to be won in the valley of the Vienne. From the right bank of the little river, winding down silvery-blue between soft green meadows to join the Loire beyond the circle of the distant hills to the north-west, the mighty steep of Chinon rises abruptly, as an old writer says, “straight up to heaven”; range upon range of narrow streets climb like the steps of a terrace up its rocky sides; acacias wave their bright foliage from every nook; and on the crest of the ridge a long line of white ruins, the remains of a stately castle, stand out against the sky. A dense woodland of oaks and larches and firs, stretching north-eastward almost to the valley of the Indre, and crowded with game of every kind, formed probably no small part of the attractions which were to make Chinon the favourite retreat of Fulk Nerra’s greatest descendant. In those ruined halls, where a rich growth of moss and creepers has replaced the tapestried hangings, earlier and later memories--memories of the Black Count or of the Maid of Orleans--seem to an English visitor only to flit like shadows around the death-bed of Henry Fitz-Empress. But it was Fulk who won Chinon for the Angevins. The persuasion of his tongue, as keen as his sword, sufficed now to gain its surrender.[368] The Great Builder’s work was all but finished; only the keystone remained to be dropped into its place. Tours itself stood out alone against the conqueror of Touraine. One more blow, and the count of Anjou would be master of the whole valley of the Loire from Amboise to the sea.

[359] R. Glaber, l. iii. c. 9 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. x. p. 40). Fulk’s mediation was done in characteristic fashion; he asked Constance “cur bestialem vesaniam erga filios exerceret.” It took effect, however.

[360] Chron. S. Petr. Senon. and Chronolog. S. Marian. Autissiod. a. 1032 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. xi. pp. 196, 308).

[361] See note B to chapter ii. above.

[362] _Hist. S. Flor. Salm._ (Marchegay, _Eglises_) p. 275. The church was consecrated December 1, 1020; Chronn. S. Serg. ad ann. (Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 134.) The foundation-charter is in Le Pelletier’s _Breviculum S. Nicolai_, p. 4.

[363] The foundation-charter, dated July 14, 1128, is in Hiret, _Antiquitez d’Anjou_, pp. 100, 101. The whole history of the church is fully discussed by M. d’Espinay, in the _Revue Historique de l’Anjou_, vol. xii. (1874), pp. 49–64, 143–155. A grotesque legend, which yet has a somewhat characteristic ring, was told of the origin of this nunnery. Fulk one day, watching a potter at his work, was seized with a desire to try his hand. He succeeded in producing a well-shaped pan, which he carried home in triumph and gave to his wife, telling her that it was made by the man whom she loved best. Hildegard, mistaking the jest for a serious charge, vowed to disprove it at once by undergoing the ordeal of water, and flung herself out of the window and into the river, before her husband could stop her. The spot where she came to land was marked by the abbey of our Lady (_Revue hist. de l’Anjou_, as above, pp. 54, 55, and note 1; Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 279 note.) Its later name of “Ronceray” was derived from a bramble-bush (_ronce_) which forced its way through the pavement of the choir, despite all attempts to uproot it. This however was in the sixteenth century.

[364] _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 101. See note C at end of chapter.

[365] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. iii. c. 235 (Hardy, pp. 401, 402).

[366] _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 116.

[367] _Gesta Amb. Domin._ (_ibid._), p. 168.

[368] _Ibid._

Strangely, yet characteristically, that final blow Fulk left to be struck by his successor. As his life drew to its close the ghostly terrors of his youth came back to him with redoubled force; and the world which had marvelled at his exploits and his crimes marvelled no less at his last penance. For the fourth time he went out to Jerusalem, and there caused two servants, bound by an oath to do whatsoever he should bid them, to drag him round the Holy City in the sight of all the Turks, one holding him by a halter round his neck, the other scourging his naked back, while he cried aloud for Heaven’s mercy on his soul as a perjured and miserable sinner.[369] He made his way homeward as far as Metz.[370] There, on June 21st, 1040, the Black Count’s soul passed away;[371] and his body was embalmed, carried home to Beaulieu, and buried in the chapter-house of the abbey which had been the monument of his earliest pilgrimage, the first-fruits of his youthful devotion and daring.[372]

[369] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. iii. c. 235 (Hardy, p. 402).

[370] “Metensem urbem,” _Gesta Cons._ (Marchegay, _Comtes_) p. 117. From the last word one would imagine this could only mean Metz in Lorraine; but there is another Metz in the Gâtinais; and although it is, and clearly always has been, an insignificant little town, quite undeserving the title of “urbs,” it seems more likely than its greater namesake to be the place really meant. For Metz in Lorraine would be completely out of the way of a traveller from Palestine to Anjou, while Metz in the Gâtinais was not merely close to Fulk’s home, but was actually in the territory of his own son-in-law (of whom we shall hear again later). It would be as natural for him to stop there on his way as it would be unnatural for him to fetch a compass through the remote dominions of the duke of Lorraine; and, on the other hand, the place is so insignificant that a careless and ignorant writer, such as John of Marmoutier, even though dwelling at no great distance, might easily forget its existence.

[371] Chronn. S. Albin. and S. Serg. a. 1040 (Marchegay, _Eglises_, pp. 24, 135). Fulk Rechin (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 377. _Gesta Cons._ (_ibid._), p. 117.

[372] Fulk Rechin and _Gesta Cons._, as above.

From Beaulieu, at least, he had deserved nothing but gratitude, and Beaulieu never forgot the debt. For seven centuries the anniversary of his death was solemnly observed in the abbey; so was that of his widow, who as a bride had helped to the dedication of the church, and who now, following her husband’s last steps, went out to die at Jerusalem.[373] For seven centuries, as the monks gathered in the church to keep their yearly festival in honour of his gift, the fragment of sacred stone, they read over in the office of the day the story of his pilgrimage, and chanted the praise of his pious theft.[374] Next to that trophy, his tomb was their pride; it vanished in the general wreck of 1793; but research within the last few years has happily succeeded in bringing the Black Count’s earthly resting-place to light once more.[375] But it was not Beaulieu alone that kept his memory green. His own little Angevin marchland, his fairer conquest Touraine, are sown thick with memorials of him. So strong was the impression made by his activity in one direction that after-generations have persisted in attributing to him almost every important architectural work in his dominions, and transferred the credit of several constructions even of Henry Fitz-Empress to the first “great builder” of Anjou, who was believed to have had command over more than mortal artificers. Popular imagination, with its unerring instinct, rightly seized upon the Black Count as the embodiment of Angevin glory and greatness. The credit of the astute politician, the valiant warrior, the consummate general, the strenuous ruler--all this is his due, and something more; the credit of having, by the initiative force of genius, launched Anjou upon her career with an impetus such as no opposing power could thenceforth avail to check. One is tempted to wonder how far into the future of his house those keen eyes of the Black Falcon really saw; whether he saw it or not, that future was in a great measure of his own making; for his fifty-three years of work and warfare had been spent in settling the question on which that future depended--the question whether Anjou or Blois was to be the chief power of central Gaul. When his place was taken by Geoffrey Martel, there could no longer be any doubt of the answer.

[373] See extract from Martyrology of Ronceray in Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 395, note 3.

[374] See the office in Salies, _Foulques-Nerra_, pp. 499 _et seq._

[375] See Salies, _Foulques-Nerra_, pp. 456 _et seq._

The new count of Anjou began his reign in circumstances very unlike those of his father half a century before. Not only had Fulk wholly changed the political position of Anjou, but Geoffrey’s own position as an individual was totally different. He was no untried boy, left to fight his own way with no weapons save the endowments which nature had given him; he was a full-grown man, trained in the school of Fulk Nerra, and already experienced in politics and war. In his own day Geoffrey Martel was looked up to with as much respect as his father, and with even more dread. His career is an illustration of the saying that nothing succeeds like success. Till he came into collision with the duke of Normandy, he carried all before him like chaff before the wind. He crushed Aquitaine; he won Tours; he won Le Mans. It was no wonder if he delighted to commemorate in the surname of Martel, “the Hammer,” the victorious blows which laid opponent after opponent at the feet of the blacksmith’s foster-son.[376] But Geoffrey was not the artificer of his own fortune. He owed his pre-eminence among the great vassals of the Crown to his extended possessions and his military reputation; he owed his extended possessions more to his father’s labours and to a series of favourable accidents than to his own qualities as a statesman; and he owed his military reputation--as one writer who understood the Angevins thoroughly has very plainly hinted--more to luck than to real generalship.[377] Geoffrey stands at a disadvantage thus far, that in contemplating him one cannot avoid two very trying comparisons. It was as unlucky for his after-fame as it was lucky for his material prosperity that he was the son of Fulk the Black; it was unlucky for him in every way that he was the rival of William the Conqueror. Neither as a statesman, a ruler, a strategist, or a man was Geoffrey equal to his father. As a statesman he showed no very lofty capacity; his designs on Aquitaine, sweeping but pointless, came to nothing in the end: and with regard to Touraine and Maine, politically, he had little to do but to reap the fruit of Fulk’s labours and use the advantages which the favour of the king in one case, the rashness of the bishop in the other, and the weakness of the rival count in both, threw absolutely into his hands. As a ruler he seems to have been looked up to with simple dread; there is little trace of the intense personal following which others of his race knew so well how to inspire;[378] the first time he was intrusted with the government of Anjou his harshness and oppression roused the indignation alike of his subjects and of his father; his neighbours looked on him to the last as a tyrant,[379] and his own people seem to have feared far more than they loved him. As a strategist there is really no proof that he possessed any such overwhelming superiority as he himself boasted, and as others were led to believe. His two great victories, at Montcontour and Montlouis, dazzled the world because the one was gained over a prince who by the tradition of ages counted as the first potentate in the realm after the duke of Normandy, and the other led to the acquisition of Tours; but the capture of William of Aquitaine was really nothing more than the fortune of war; while in the case of the victory over Theobald of Blois at Montlouis, a considerable part of the credit is due to Geoffrey’s lieutenant Lisoy of Amboise; and moreover, to have beaten the successor of Odo II. is after all no very wonderful achievement for the successor of Fulk the Black. Twice in his life Geoffrey met his master. The first time he owned it himself as he lay at his father’s feet. The second time he evaded the risk of open defeat by a tacit withdrawal far more shameful in a moral point of view. It is small blame to Geoffrey Martel that he was no match for William the Conqueror. Had he, in honest consciousness of his inferiority, done his best to avoid a collision, and when it became inevitable stood to face the consequences like a man, it would have been small shame to him to be defeated by the future victor of Senlac. The real shame is that after courting an encounter and loudly boasting of his desire to break a lance with William, when the opportunity was given him he silently declined to use it. It was but a mean pride and a poor courage that looked upon defeat in fair fight as an unbearable humiliation, and could not feel the deeper moral humiliation of shrinking from the mere chance of that defeat. And it is just this bluntness of feeling, this callousness to everything not visible and tangible to outward sense, which sets Geoffrey as a man far below his father. There is in Fulk a living warmth, a quickness of susceptibility, which breaks out in all sorts of shapes, good and bad, in all the stories of the Black Count, but which seems wholly lacking in Geoffrey. Fulk “sinned bravely,” ardently, impulsively; Geoffrey sinned meanly, coldly, heartlessly. His was altogether a coarser, lower nature. Fulk was truly the falcon that wheels its swift and lofty flight ever closer and closer above the doomed quarry till it strikes it down irresistibly with one unerring swoop. Geoffrey rightly thought himself better represented by the crashing blows of the insensible sledge-hammer.

[376] Fulk Rechin (Marchegay, _Comtes_) p. 379; cf. _Hist. S. Flor. Salm._ (Marchegay, _Eglises_), p. 260, and Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. iii. c. 231 (Hardy, p. 395).

[377] “Gaufredus cognomento Martellus, quod ipse sibi usurpaverat, quia videbatur sibi _felicitate quâdam_ omnes obsistentes contundere.” Will. Malm. as above.

[378] Even the devotion of Lisoy of Amboise seems to have been given to Geoffrey chiefly because he was his father’s son. Fulk was its real object.

[379] See the Norman writers, Orderic and William of Poitiers.

Geoffrey had been an independent ruler in a small sphere for nearly ten years before his father’s death. In 1030 or 1031 he became master of the little county of Vendôme by purchase from his half-sister Adela, the only child of Fulk’s ill-starred first marriage, and the heiress of her maternal grandfather Count Burchard. After doing homage to King Henry for the fief, Geoffrey’s first act was to found in the capital of his new dominions an abbey dedicated to the Holy Trinity.[380] The appointment of an abbot proved the occasion for the first recorded outbreak of that latent discord between Fulk and his heir which, as we have seen, culminated at last in open war. A monk named Reginald had just been sent at Fulk’s request from the great abbey of Marmoutier near Tours, to take the place of Baldwin, abbot of S. Nicolas at Angers, who had fled to bury himself in a hermitage. Before the day came for Reginald’s ordination, however, he deserted to a younger patron, and accepted the abbotship of Geoffrey’s newly-founded abbey at Vendôme. Fulk, thus disappointed by two abbots in succession, “flew,” as he himself said, “into a mighty rage,” summarily ordered the whole colony of monks whom he had brought from Marmoutier to S. Nicolas back to their parent monastery, and replaced them with some of the brethren of S. Aubin’s at Angers, with Hilduin, prior of that convent, as their head.[381] Fulk’s wrath seems to have been directed against the monks rather than against his son; but the incident serves as an illustration of the tendency to opposition that was springing up in Geoffrey’s mind. The quiet, waiting policy of Fulk’s latter years was evidently irksome to the young man’s impatient spirit, and he chose to strike out a path for himself in a direction which, it is not surprising to learn, did not please the old count. The only one of his neighbours with whom Fulk seems to have been always on peaceable terms was the count of Poitou. William Fierabras, the count from whom Geoffrey Greygown had wrested Loudun, died about two years after the second battle of Conquereux.[382] His wife was a daughter of Theobald the Trickster,[383] and his son and successor was therefore first cousin to Odo II. of Blois; but William IV.--whom Aquitaine reckoned as her “William the Great”--seems to have had little in common with his erratic kinsman, and to have always, on the other hand, maintained a friendly understanding with Anjou. Like Odo, he once received an offer of the crown of Italy; Fulk appears in the negotiations as the friendly advocate of the duke’s interests with King Robert,[384] and though the project came to nothing, it may have been in return for Fulk’s good offices on this occasion that William bestowed on him the investiture of Saintes, a gift which was to form the pretext for more than one war between their descendants. On January 31st, 1029, William died,[385] leaving as his successor a son who bore the same name, and whose mother seems to have been a sister of Queen Constance.[386] It was this new duke of Aquitaine, known as William the Fat, whom Geoffrey Martel selected as the first victim of his heavy hand. An Angevin story attributes the origin of the war to a dispute about Saintes or Saintonge,[387] but it will not bear examination. Geoffrey Martel simply trod in the steps of Geoffrey Greygown, and with more marked success. In the autumn of 1033 he started on an expedition against the duke of Aquitaine; William encountered him on September 20th in a pitched battle near the abbey of S. Jouin-de-Marne, not far from Montcontour in Poitou; the Poitevins were defeated, partly, it seems, through treason in their own ranks, and their duke was taken prisoner.[388] For three years the duke of Aquitaine, the second great feudatary of the realm, was kept in a dungeon by the count of Vendôme;[389] not till the whole district of Saintonge[390] and several important towns were ceded to Geoffrey, and an annual tribute promised, would he release his captive. From the execution of the last humiliating condition William was delivered by death; the cruel treatment he had suffered in prison had done its work; Geoffrey had exacted the ransom for his prisoner just in time, and sent him home only to die three days after his liberation.[391]

[380] _Origo Com. Vindoc._, in _Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. xi. p. 31. See also Mabillon, _Ann. Bened._, vol. iv. pp. 378, 379.

[381] The whole story is told only by Fulk himself, in a charter to the abbey of S. Nicolas; _Breviculum S. Nicolai_ (Le Pelletier), quoted in Mabillon, _Ann. Bened._, vol. iv. p. 379.

[382] See editor’s note to Peter of Maillezais, _Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. x. p. 183, note _g_.

[383] Chron. S. Maxent. a. 972 (Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 380).

[384] Adem. Chabanais, _Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. x. p. 161. Letters of William of Poitou, _ib._ pp. 483, 484; of Fulk to Robert, _ib._ pp. 500, 501.

[385] Chron. S. Maxent. ad ann. (Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 390).

[386] She was Adelmodia, widow of Boso, count of La Marche, and daughter of William count of Arles and “Candida,” otherwise Adelaide the White; see Pet. Maillezais, l. i. c. 6 (_Rer. Gall. Scriptt._, vol. x. p. 182), and note B at end of chapter.

[387] See note C at end of chapter iv. below.

[388] Chronn. S. Maxent. a. 1032, S. Albin. and S. Flor. Salm. a. 1033 (Marchegay, _Eglises_, pp. 391, 392, 23, 188); S. Serg. a. 1028 (_ib._ p. 135). Fulk Rechin (Marchegay, _Comtes_), p. 378. Cf. _Gesta Cons._ (_ibid._), pp. 128–130, and note C to