England under the Angevin Kings, Volumes I and II

CHAPTER III. (Part 1 of 2)

One vivid Angevin legend tells of a count who married a woman of unearthly beauty who refused church; when forced to stay during a consecration, she shook off her cloak to reveal two children beneath, took the two at her left, floated out a window, and vanished. Richard Lionheart later quipped: “What wonder if we lack the natural affections of mankind—we who come from the devil, and must needs go back to the devil?” The legend was almost certainly invented in the anxious late 10th century, when apocalypse fears led people to attribute Fulk the Black’s superhuman energy and cruelty to demonic influence. Fulk was barely eight when his father Geoffrey died in 987, surrounded by powerful enemies with only the newly crowned Hugh Capet as ally. Yet before manhood he was the most dominant figure in French politics, his 53-year reign one of the century’s most remarkable: wild passion fused with cool far-seeing policy, ruthless pursuit of power paired with sudden superstitious remorse—a vivid, intensely human figure, the typical Angevin count.

The Capetian kingdom was a shadow of the Carolingian realm: the king had almost no real power over Normandy, Brittany, or Aquitaine. The real struggle was among great vassals of the old Duchy of France, above all Blois-Chartres-Tours, whose territories pressed against Anjou’s eastern border. The central question of Fulk’s life was whether Anjou or Blois would dominate central Gaul, and every action served that end. His first victory came before age fourteen: when Conan seized Nantes after the 990 deaths of Guerech and his son, Fulk bribed the city’s guards, took Nantes, and challenged Conan to battle at Conquereux. Conan dug hidden trenches, and when Fulk’s cavalry charged, 2000 men and horses drowned or were crushed. Fulk was thrown and stunned, his army on the brink, until he rallied his men with a cry that sent them charging back like wind through corn; the Breton army was almost destroyed, Conan killed. Fulk marched into Nantes, set Hoel’s young son Judicaël as count under an Angevin guardian, reunited the land west of the Mayenne, securing the entire Loire from Angers to the sea. He then turned east to Touraine, raiding Blois territory, fighting Odo I’s sons until Theobald’s 1004 death left Odo II as his lifelong rival. Odo was impulsive and unscrupulous: he seized Melun castle from the king’s favorite in 999, fleeing ignominiously when the Norman duke intervened; his whole life was half-finished schemes, and his house would fail for lacking Fulk’s thoroughness. This rivalry foreshadowed the 12th-century struggle between Stephen of Blois and Henry of Anjou for the English crown.

In the chaotic decade after Odo I’s death and King Robert’s illegal marriage to Bertha, Fulk built a chain of fortresses from Angers along his Poitevin conquests in a wide half-circle back to Amboise, cutting Blois in half: Montreuil, Passavant, Maulévrier, Loudun, Mirebeau, Loches, Montrésor, Montrichard, and Amboise. Then came the dreaded year 1000, when half Europe feared the apocalypse. Fulk had married Elizabeth, Vendôme heiress, but she was executed for adultery and burned at the stake; immediately after, fire destroyed much of Angers, taken as divine judgement. When the world failed to end, Fulk’s superstitious terror turned to remorse. He left Anjou to his brother Maurice and set out on pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre—the first Angevin pilgrimage that would eventually tie the house to the Holy Land and place an Angevin dynasty on its throne. Legend says he bit off a fragment of the True Cross in devotional fervor, brought it back to found Beaulieu Abbey near Loches, buying the land from a man named Ingelger with the quip “A man without wit his freehold must quit.” On wife Hildegard’s advice, he dedicated it to the Holy Trinity; by the consecration their son Geoffrey was nearly three. The consecration was delayed when the archbishop of Tours refused unless Fulk returned disputed Montrichard; Fulk appealed to Rome, won, and the church was consecrated by a papal legate in May 1012. That afternoon a storm blew the roof clean off, taken as divine wrath; Fulk rebuilt and pushed on. He then defied both king and count of Blois: when King Robert sought to reunite with Bertha, Fulk had twelve armed men assassinate the king’s favorite Hugh of Beauvais at a hunting party right before the king. The crime went unpunished, a sign of Fulk’s power, and he soon left on a second pilgrimage. When he returned, the storm on his eastern border was about to break.