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.

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.

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]

Then Geoffrey threw off the mask. William had no children; his next heir was his half-brother Odo, the son of his father’s second marriage with Brisca, heiress of Gascony.[392] But after Brisca’s death, William the Great had married a third wife, whom he had left a still young widow with three little children. Before William the Fat had been many months dead, his stepmother the widowed Countess Agnes gave her hand to Geoffrey of Vendôme.[393] Geoffrey’s motive is plain; he sought to prevent the union of Poitou and Gascony and to get the former practically into his own hands as stepfather and guardian to the young sons of Agnes. But in Anjou the wedding gave great scandal; Geoffrey and Agnes were denounced in the harshest terms as too near akin to marry.[394] They seem in fact to have been, by the reckoning of the canon law, cousins in the third degree, as being, one a grandson, the other a great-granddaughter of Adela of Chalon, the second wife of Geoffrey Greygown.[395] At any rate they were looked upon as sinners, and by no one more than the bridegroom’s father. The whole scheme of Geoffrey’s meddlings in Aquitaine was repugnant to Fulk Nerra’s policy; he looked to his son to complete his own labours in Touraine and Maine, and it was no good omen for the fulfilment of his hopes when Geoffrey thus turned his back upon his appointed work for the love of Countess Agnes or of her late husband’s possessions. The capture of William the Fat had been the signal for the first outbreak of a “more than civil war” between father and son;[396] Geoffrey’s misconduct during his regency in Anjou brought matters to the crisis which ended in his first and last public defeat. Nevertheless he obstinately pursued his projects. The Poitevins, by the death of their count, were left, as their own chronicler says, “as sheep having no shepherd”; there was a party among them ready to support the claims of Agnes’s sons against their elder half-brother Odo of Gascony; and one of the leaders of this party, William of Parthenay, built with Angevin help a fortress at Germont in which he held out successfully against the besieging forces of Odo. The count of Gascony then proceeded to Mausé, another stronghold of his enemies, and in assaulting this place he was slain.[397] He left no children; the elder of Geoffrey Martel’s stepsons was now therefore heir to Poitou. The boys were twins; the third child of Agnes was a girl, who bore her mother’s name, and for whom her mother and stepfather contrived in 1043 to arrange a marriage with no less important a personage than the Emperor Henry III.,[398] whose first wife had been a daughter of Cnut. It was not till the year after this imperial wedding that the troubled affairs of Aquitaine were definitely settled. In 1044 Countess Agnes came to Poitiers accompanied by her two sons, Peter and Geoffrey, and her husband, their stepfather, Geoffrey Martel; there they held with the chief nobles of Poitou a council at which Peter, or William as he was thenceforth called, was solemnly ordained as duke of Aquitaine, and his brother sent into Gascony to become its count.[399] Agnes at least must now have attained her object; whether Geoffrey Martel was equally satisfied with the result of his schemes may be a question, for we do not clearly know how wide the range of those schemes really was. If, as seems likely, they included the hope of acquiring a lasting hold over Aquitaine, then their issue was a failure. By the victory of Montcontour Geoffrey had gained for himself at one blow a great military reputation; but for Anjou the only solid gain was the acquisition of Saintonge, and this, like some of the outlying possessions of the house of Blois, soon proved more trouble than profit. If Martel expected that his stepsons would hold themselves indebted to him for their coronets and remain his grateful and dutiful miscalculation. The marriage of a duchess-dowager of Aquitaine with Geoffrey Martel naturally suggests thoughts of the marriage of a duchess-regnant with a later count of Anjou; but the resemblance between the two cases is of the most superficial kind; the earlier connexion between Anjou and Aquitaine did little or nothing to pave the way for their later union. Geoffrey himself, indeed, had already discovered that although the count of Vendôme might go seeking adventures in the south, the duties and the interests of the count of Anjou still lay to the north, or at the utmost no farther away than the banks of the great frontier-river.

The visions of empire to which Odo of Champagne had sacrificed the latter years of his life had perished with him on the field of Bar. Not a foot of land outside the limits of the kingdom of France had he left to his heirs. He had two sons, Theobald and Stephen, whose very names seemed to mark out their destined shares in his dominions. Stephen, the younger, became count of Champagne; to Theobald, the elder, fell the original territories of his house—Blois, Chartres and Tours.[400] Theobald’s heritage however was shorn of its fairest portion. The county of Tours now comprised little more than the capital; all Touraine south of the Loire—by far the most fertile and valuable half—was in the power of the Angevin; Tours itself, once a secure central post, had become a closely threatened border-city. Theobald’s first duty was to protect it, but it seems to have been the last thing he thought of. Odo’s sons had inherited all his wrongheadedness without his quickness of thought and action. Shut in as they were on all sides by powerful foes, the two young men began their career by rebelling after the manner of their forefathers;[401] and the king’s youngest brother Odo was lured, by a promise of dethroning Henry in his favour, into joining in their rebellion. Odo, a youth of weak intellect, was in himself no very formidable person, but he might for the very same reason become a dangerous tool in the hands of his fellow-conspirators; and a rebellious coalition of Blois and Champagne threatened to be a serious difficulty for the king at a moment when there was scarcely one of the great feudataries on whom he could reckon for support. The death of Duke Robert of Normandy had plunged his duchy into confusion and deprived Henry of all chance of help in the quarter which had hitherto been his chief source of strength. The county of Burgundy was governed by the king’s brother Robert, who had with difficulty been induced to accept it as compensation for the failure of his hopes of the crown. Flanders and Britanny were always indifferent to the troubles and necessities of the king; the count of Vermandois was a kinsman and ally of Champagne; Aquitaine was as powerless as Normandy. The one vassal to whom Henry could look for aid was the count of Anjou. Had the rebels possessed sense and spirit they might have given Henry quite as much trouble as their father had given Robert; but they seem to have had no well-concerted plan; each acted independently, and each was crushed singly. Young Odo, their puppet pretender, was easily caught and imprisoned at Orléans; Stephen of Champagne was defeated in a pitched battle by the king himself;[402] Theobald of Blois was left to be dealt with by other hands. With a master-stroke of policy, Henry proclaimed the city of Tours forfeit by Theobald’s rebellion, and granted its investiture to the count of Anjou.[403]