On July 26, 1158, Geoffrey died.[1431] The county of Nantes was at once seized by Conan and claimed by the king of England as heir to his childless brother;[1432] and on the eve of the Assumption Henry landed in Normandy to enforce his claim. Before resorting to arms, however, he deemed it prudent to secure the assent of the lord paramount of Britanny, King Louis of France, to his intended proceedings. The negotiations were again intrusted to the chancellor, and again with marked success. At a conference held on the last day of August[1433] Louis did far more than sanction Henry’s claim upon Nantes; he granted him a formal commission to arbitrate between the competitors for the dukedom of Britanny and settle the whole question in dispute as he might think good, in virtue of his office as grand seneschal of France.[1434] This office was now little more than honorary, and was held throughout the greater part of the reign of Louis VII. by the count of Blois; but the rival house of Anjou seems to have also put forth a claim to it, which Louis admitted for a moment, as on the present occasion, whenever it suited his own purposes.[1435] From Argentan, on September 8, Henry issued a summons to the whole feudal host of Normandy to assemble at Avranches on Michaelmas-day for an expedition into Britanny. He himself spent the interval in a visit to Paris, where he was entertained by Louis with the highest honours; the betrothal of little Henry and Margaret was ratified, and the baby-bride was handed over to the care of her future father-in-law, who intrusted her for education to a faithful Norman baron, Robert of Neubourg.[1436] The host gathered at Avranches on the appointed day, but only to witness Conan’s submission. He knew that he was no match for the king of England with the king of France at his back; so he put himself into Henry’s hands, and received his confirmation in the dukedom of Britanny in return for the surrender of Nantes.[1437] Henry, after a visit to the Mont-S.-Michel and a brief halt at Pontorson to restore the castle, proceeded to take formal possession of Nantes; he then went to besiege Thouars,[1438] whose lord was in rebellion against him. In November he met Louis at Le Mans,[1439] and thence conducted him on a triumphal progress through Normandy. After going through Pacy and Evreux to Neubourg, that the French king might see his little daughter, they were received with a solemn procession at Bec; they then visited the abbey of Mont-S.-Michel, where Louis had a vow to pay, and from Avranches Henry escorted his guest by way of Bayeux, Caen and Rouen safely and honourably back to his own dominions.[1440]

The county of Nantes was in itself a very trifling addition to the vast possessions of Henry Fitz-Empress; yet its acquisition was a more important matter than appears at first sight. Nantes, by its geographical position, commanded the mouth of the Loire; its political destinies were therefore of the highest consequence to the princes whose dominions lay along the course of that river. The carefully planned series of advances whereby Geoffrey Greygown and Fulk the Black had gradually turned the whole navigable extent of the Loire into a high-way through their own territories would have been almost useless had they not begun by securing the entrance-gate. To Henry, who as count of Poitou had command of the opposite shore of the estuary, there might have been less danger in the chance of hostility at Nantes; but the place was, for another reason, of greater value to him than it could ever have been to his ancestors. From the English Channel to the Pyrenees he was master of the entire western half—by far the larger half—of Gaul, with one exception: between his Norman and his Aquitanian duchy there jutted out the Breton peninsula. Britanny must have been in Henry’s eyes something like what Tours had been in those of Geoffrey Martel:—a perpetual temptation to his ambition, a fragment of alien ground which must have seemed to him destined almost by the fitness of things to become absorbed sooner or later into the surrounding mass from which it stood out in a sort of unnatural isolation. By his acquisition of Nantes he had gained a footing in the Breton duchy, somewhat as his forefathers had gained one in the city of Tours by their canonry at S. Martin’s; and as a grant of investiture from the French king had served as the final stepping-stone to Martel’s great conquest, so the privilege of arbitration conferred by Louis upon Henry might pave the way for more direct intervention in Britanny. The meaning of this autumn’s work is well summed up by Gervase of Canterbury: “This was Henry’s first step towards subduing the Bretons.”[1441] A week before the assembly at Avranches his fourth son had been born;[1442] the infant was baptized by the name of Geoffrey. It would indeed have been strange if the name made famous by Henry’s own father, as well as by so many of the earlier members of the family, had been allowed to drop out of use in the next generation. Yet by the light of after-events one may suspect that its revival at this particular moment had a special reference to the memory of the lately deceased Count Geoffrey of Nantes, and that the new-born child’s future destiny as duke of Britanny was already foreshadowed, however vaguely, in his father’s dreams.

The year closed amid general tranquillity. So cordial was, or seemed to be, the alliance of the two kings, that they planned a joint crusade against the Moors in Spain, and wrote to ask the Pope’s blessing upon their undertaking;[1443] and a long-standing dispute between Henry and Theobald of Blois was settled before Christmas by the mediation of Louis.[1444] In England the year is marked by nothing more important than a new issue of coinage.[1445] The administration of the country was directed by the two justiciars, assisted, formally at least, by the queen,[1446] until shortly before Christmas, when she went over sea to keep the feast with her husband at Cherbourg.[1447] Unhappily, the beginnings of strife followed in her train.

The duchy of Aquitaine, or Guyenne, as held by Eleanor’s predecessors, consisted, roughly speaking, of the territory between the Loire and the Garonne. More exactly, it was bounded on the north by Anjou and Touraine, on the east by Berry and Auvergne, on the south-east by the Quercy or county of Cahors, and on the south-west by Gascony, which had been united with it for the last hundred years. The old Karolingian kingdom of Aquitania had been of far greater extent; it had in fact included the whole country between the Loire, the Pyrenees, the Rhône and the ocean. Over all this vast territory the counts of Poitou asserted a theoretical claim of overlordship by virtue of their ducal title; they had, however, a formidable rival in the house of the counts of Toulouse. These represented an earlier line of dukes of Aquitaine, successors of the dukes of Gothia or Septimania, under whom the capital of southern Gaul had been not Poitiers but Toulouse, Poitou itself counting as a mere underfief. In the latter half of the tenth century these dukes of Gothia or Aquitania Prima, as the Latin chroniclers sometimes called them from the old Roman name of their country, had seen their ducal title transferred to the Poitevin lords of Aquitania Secunda—the dukes of Aquitaine with whom we have had to deal. But the Poitevin overlordship was never fully acknowledged by the house of Toulouse; and this latter in the course of the following century again rose to great importance and distinction, which reached its height in the person of Count Raymond IV., better known as Raymond of St. Gilles, from the name of the little county which had been his earliest possession. From that small centre his rule gradually spread over the whole territory of the ancient dukes of Septimania. In the year of the Norman conquest of England Rouergue, which was held by a younger branch of the house of Toulouse, lapsed to the elder line; in the year after the Conqueror’s death Raymond came into possession of Toulouse itself; in 1094 he became, in right of his wife, owner of half the Burgundian county of Provence. His territorial influence was doubled by that of his personal fame; he was one of the chief heroes of the first Crusade; and when he died in 1105 he left to his son Bertrand, over and above his Aquitanian heritage, the Syrian county of Tripoli. On Bertrand’s death in 1112 these possessions were divided, his son Pontius succeeding him as count of Tripoli, and surrendering his claims upon Toulouse to his uncle Alfonso Jordan, a younger son of Raymond of St. Gilles.[1448] Those claims, however, were disputed. Raymond’s elder brother, Count William IV., had left an only daughter who, after a childless marriage with King Sancho Ramirez of Aragon,[1449] became the wife of Count William VIII. of Poitou.[1450] From that time forth it became a moot point whether the lord of St. Gilles or the lord of Poitiers was the rightful count of Toulouse. Raymond unquestionably bore the title and exercised its functions for some six years before his brother’s death and his niece’s second marriage,[1451] and one historian asserts that he had acquired the county by purchase from his brother.[1452] Another story relates that William of Poitou having married the heiress of Toulouse after her father’s death,[1453] immediately entered upon her inheritance, but afterwards pledged it to Raymond in order to raise money for the Crusade.[1454] The reckless, spendthrift duke, whose whole energies were given up to verse-making, discreditable adventures, and either defying or eluding the ecclesiastical authorities who vainly strove to check the scandals of his life, never found means to redeem his pledge; neither did his son William IX.,[1455] although it appears that he did at some time or other contrive to obtain possession of Toulouse.[1456] On his death, however, it immediately passed back into the hands of Alfonso Jordan.

With all these shiftings and changes of ownership the kings of France had never tried to interfere. Southern Gaul—“Aquitaine” in the wider sense—was a land whose internal concerns they found it wise to leave as far as possible untouched. It was, even yet, a land wholly distinct from the northern realm whose sovereign was its nominal overlord. The geographical barrier formed by the river Loire had indeed been long ago passed over, if not exactly by the French kings, at least by the Angevin counts. But a wider and deeper gulf than the blue stream of Loire stood fixed between France and Aquitaine. They were peopled by different races, they belonged to different worlds. There was little community of blood, there was less community of speech, thought and temper, of social habits or political traditions, between the Teutonized Celt of the north and the southern Celt who had been moulded by the influences of the Roman, the Goth and the Saracen. Steeped in memories of the Roman Empire in its palmiest days, and of the Gothic kingdom of Toulouse which had inherited so large a share of its power, its culture and its glory, Aquitania had never amalgamated either with the Teutonic empire of the Karolings or with the French kingdom of their Parisian supplanters. Her princes were nominal feudataries of both; but, save in a few exceptional cases, the personal and political relations between the northern lord paramount and his southern vassals began and ended with the formal ceremonies of investiture and homage. In the struggle of Anjou and Blois for command over the policy of the Crown, in the struggle of the Crown itself to maintain its independence and to hold the balance between Anjou and Normandy, the Aquitanian princes took no part; the balance of powers in northern Gaul was nothing to them; neither party ever seriously attempted to enroll them as allies; both seem to have considered them, as they considered themselves, totally unconcerned in the matter. Whatever external connexions and alliances they cultivated were in quite another direction—in the Burgundian provinces which lay around the mouth of the Rhône and the western foot of the Alps, and on the debateable ground of the Spanish March, the county of Barcelona, which formed a link between Gascony and Aragon. The marriage of Louis and Eleanor, however, altered the political position of Aquitaine with respect not only to the French Crown but to the world at large. She was suddenly dragged out of her isolation and brought into contact with the general political system of northern Europe, somewhat as England had been by its association with Normandy. The union of the king and the duchess was indeed dissolved before its full consequences had time to work themselves out. Its first and most obvious result was a change in the attitude of the Crown towards the internal concerns of Aquitaine. Whether the count of Toulouse paid homage to the count of Poitou, or both alike paid it immediately to the Crown—whether Toulouse and Poitiers were in the same or in different hands—mattered little or nothing to the earlier kings whose practical power over either fief was all bound up in the mere formal grant of investiture. But to Eleanor’s husband such questions wore a very different aspect. To him who was in his own person duke of Aquitaine as well as its overlord, they were matters of direct personal concern; the interests of the house of Poitou were identified with those of the house of France. For his own sake and for the sake of his posterity which he naturally hoped would succeed him in both kingdom and duchy, it was of the utmost importance that Louis should strive to make good every jot and tittle of the Poitevin claims throughout southern Gaul.