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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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]

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]

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.