The old Breton kingdom had now sunk into a duchy which was constantly a prey to civil war. The ruling house of the counts of Nantes were at perpetual strife with their rivals of Rennes. Alan Barbetorte, count of Nantes, had been compelled to flee the country and take shelter in England, at the general refuge of all exiles, the court of Æthelstan, till a treaty between Æthelstan’s successor Eadmund and Louis From-over-sea restored him to the dukedom of Britanny for the rest of his life. He died in 952, leaving his duchy and his infant son Drogo to the care of his wife’s brother, Theobald, count of Blois and Chartres, a wily, unscrupulous politician known by the well-deserved epithet of “the Trickster,” who at once resolved to turn his brother-in-law’s dying charge to account for purposes of his own. But between his own territories and the Breton duchy lay the Angevin march; his first step therefore must be to make a friend of its ruler. For this end a very simple means presented itself. Fulk’s wife had left him a widower with one son;[258] Theobald offered him the hand of his sister, the widow of Alan, and with it half the city and county of Nantes, to have and to hold during Drogo’s minority; while he gave the other half to the rival claimant of the duchy, Juhel Berenger of Rennes, under promise of obedience to himself as overlord.[259] Unhappily, the re-marriage of Alan’s widow was soon followed by the death of her child. In later days Breton suspicion laid the blame upon his step-father; but the story has come down to us in a shape so extremely improbable that it can leave no stain on the memory of the Good Count.[260] Two sons of Alan, both much older than Drogo, still remained. But they were not sons of Drogo’s mother; Fulk therefore might justly think himself entitled to dispute their claims to the succession, and hold that, in default of lawful heirs, the heritage of Duke Alan should pass, as the dowry of the widow, to her second husband—a practice very common in that age. And Fulk would naturally feel his case strengthened by the fact that part at least of the debateable land—that is, nearly half the territory between the Mayenne and Nantes itself—had once been Angevin ground.

Just at this crisis the Normans made a raid upon Britanny, of which their dukes claimed the overlordship. They captured the bishop of Nantes, and the citizens, thus left without a leader of any kind, and in hourly fear of being attacked by the “pirates,” sent an urgent appeal to Fulk for help. Fulk promised to send them succour, but some delay occurred; at the end of a week’s waiting the people of Nantes acted for themselves, and succeeded in putting the invaders to flight. Indignant at the Angevin count’s failure to help, they threw off all allegiance to him and chose for their ruler Hoel, one of the sons of Alan Barbetorte.[261]

These clouds on the western horizon did not trouble the peace of Fulk’s last hour. As he knelt to receive the holy communion in S. Martin’s church on one of the feasts of the patron saint, a slight feeling of illness came over him; he returned to his place in the choir, and there, in the arms of his brother-canons, passed quietly away.[262] We cannot doubt that they laid him to rest in the church he had loved so well.[263] With him was buried the peace of the Marchland. Never again was it to have a ruler who “waged no wars”; never again, till the title of count of Anjou was on the eve of being merged in loftier appellations, was that title to be borne by one whose character might give him some claim to share the epithet of “the Good,” although circumstances caused him to lead a very different life. Fulk the Second stands all alone as the ideal Angevin count, and it is in this point of view that the legends of his life—for we cannot call them history—have a value of their own. The most famous of them all is, in its original shape, a charming bit of pure Christian poetry. One day—so the tradition ran—the count, on his way to Tours, was accosted by a leper desiring to be carried to S. Martin’s. All shrank in horror from the wretched being except Fulk, who at once took him on his shoulders and carried him to the church-door. There his burthen suddenly vanished; and at the midnight service, as the count-canon sat in his stall, he beheld in a trance S. Martin, who told him that in his charity he had, like another S. Christopher, unwittingly carried the Lord Himself.[264] Later generations added a sequel to the story. Fulk, they said, after his return to Angers, was further rewarded by a second vision; an angel came to him and foretold that his successors to the ninth generation should extend their power even to the ends of the earth.[265] At the time when this prophecy appears in history, it had already reached its fulfilment. In all likelihood it was then a recent invention; in the legend to which it was attached it has obviously no natural place. But its introduction into the story of Fulk the Good was prompted by a significant instinct. At the height of their power and their glory, the reckless, ruthless house of Anjou still did not scorn to believe that their greatness had been foretold not to the warrior-founder, not to the bravest of his descendants, but to the good count who sought after righteousness and peace. Even they were willing, in theory at least, to accept the dominion of the earth as the promised reward not of valour but of charity.

Whatever may be the origin of the prophecy, however, it was in the reign of Fulk’s son and successor Geoffrey Greygown that the first steps were taken towards its realization. Legend has been as busy with the first Geoffrey of Anjou as with his father; but it is legend of a very different kind. The epic bards of the marchland singled out Geoffrey for their special favourite; in their hands he became the hero of marvellous combats, of impossible deeds of knightly prowess and strategical skill, of marvellous stories utterly unhistoric in form, but significant as indications of the character popularly attributed to him—a character quite borne out by those parts of his career which are attested by authentic history. Whatever share of Fulk’s more refined tastes may have been inherited by either of his sons seems to have fallen to the second, Guy, who early passed into the quiet life of the monk in the abbey of S. Paul at Corméri in Touraine.[266] The elder was little more than a rough, dashing soldier, whose careless temper shewed itself in his very dress. Clad in the coarse grey woollen tunic of the Angevin peasantry,[267] Geoffrey Greygown made himself alike by his simple attire and by his daring valour a conspicuous figure in the courts and camps of King Lothar and Duke Hugh.

The receiver of Fulk’s famous letter had gone before him to the grave; Louis From-over-sea, the grandson of Eadward the Elder, the last Karolingian worthy of his race, had died in 954. His death brought the house of France a step nearer to the throne; but it was still only one step. Lothar, the son of Louis, was crowned in his father’s stead; two years later the king-maker followed the king; and thenceforth his son, the new duke of the French, Hugh Capet, steadily prepared to exchange his ducal cap for a crown which nevertheless he was too prudent to seize before the time. In the face of countless difficulties, Louis in his eighteen years’ reign had contrived to restore the monarchy of Laon to a very real kingship. His greatest support in this task had been his wife’s brother, the Emperor Otto the Great. The two brothers-in-law, who had come to their thrones in the same year, were fast friends in life and death; and Otto remained the faithful guardian of his widowed sister and her son. So long as he lived, Hugh’s best policy was peace; and while Hugh remained quiet, there was little scope for military or political action on the part of his adherent Geoffrey of Anjou. In 973, however, the great Emperor died; and soon after he was gone the alliance between the Eastern and Western Franks began to shew signs of breaking. Lothar and Otto II. were brothers-in-law as well as cousins, but they were not friends as their fathers had been. In an evil hour Lothar was seized with a wild longing to regain the land which bore his name,—that fragment of the old “Middle Kingdom,” known as the duchy of Lotharingia or Lorraine, which after long fluctuating between its attachment to the imperial crown and its loyalty to the Karolingian house had finally cast in its lot with the Empire, with the full assent of Louis From-over-sea. Lothar brooded over its loss till in 978, when Otto and his queen were holding their court at Aachen, his jealousy could no longer endure the sight of his rival so near the border, and he summoned the nobles of his realm to an expedition into Lorraine.[268] Nothing could better fall in with the plans of Hugh Capet than a breach between Lothar and Otto; the call to arms was readily answered by the duke and his followers, and the grey tunic of the Angevin count was conspicuous at the muster.[269] The suddenness of Lothar’s march compelled Otto to make a hasty retreat from Aachen; but all that the West-Franks gained was a mass of plunder, and the vain glory of turning the great bronze eagle on the palace of Charles the Great towards the east instead of the west.[270] While they were plundering Aachen Otto was preparing a counter-invasion.[271] Bursting upon the western realm, he drove the king to cross the Seine and seek help of the duke, and before Hugh could gather troops enough to stop him he had made his way to the gates of Paris. For a while the French and the Germans lay encamped on opposite banks of the river, the duke waiting till his troops came up, and beguiling the time with skirmishes and trials of individual valour.[272] But as soon as Otto perceived that his adversaries were becoming dangerous he struck his tents and marched rapidly homewards, satisfied with having inflicted on his rash cousin a far greater alarm and more serious damage than he had himself suffered from Lothar’s wild raid.[273]