In the continuation of Aimon’s History of France, an ancient chronicle of the thirteenth century, it is stated that the Châtelain of Chateau Renard had a son, named Athos, who rendered himself famous by his deeds of daring, and, in the reign of King Robert of France—A.D. 1020—fortified the town of Courtenay.
(From an Engraving by S. and N. Buck)
From this castle, situated on a hill in the rich and wooded country which stretches over that district anciently called L’Isle de France, the descendants of Athos took their title. The name of his wife, the mother of the race, is nowhere recorded, although Bouchet, the historian of the French branch of the Courtenay family, states that she was “une dame de condition”; and the truth of this statement is verified by the fact that in those days, when the prerogatives of birth were universally acknowledged, her progeny were considered fitting mates for the noblest in the kingdom.
Jocelyn de Courtenay, the son of Athos and his unnamed wife, married twice: first, in the year 1060, Hildegarde, daughter of Geoffrey de Ferole, Comte de Gastinois; second, Elizabeth, daughter of Guy, Seigneur de Montlehery, by whom he had three sons—Milo, Jocelyn, and Geoffry.
At this period of history, the countries of Europe were undergoing one of those strange religious convulsions which frequently occurred in the Middle Ages. The passionate pilgrimage of Peter the Hermit drew motley crowds of so-called Christians to the Holy Land. Wherever the small, mean monk of Picardy, seated on his ass, “pusillus, persona contemptibilis et sponte fluens ei non deerat eloquium,” as William of Tyre describes him, preached the holiness of the Cause and the shame to Christendom that the Sepulchre of the Saviour should remain in infidel hands, his earnestness and enthusiasm, if not his eloquence, made thousands of fervid converts.
In those days of lawlessness and violence, few men of rank but had the stain of blood-guiltiness upon their souls. The richer hoped to buy salvation and release from their wrongdoings by founding abbeys and bestowing, out of their abundance, generous grants of land to maintain the same; the poorer went pilgrimages, and purchased the promise of as much future happiness as their possessions would afford.
But to the fighting noble of the day, whatever means he may already have taken to obtain the pardon of the Church, the call to arms by Pope Urban for the defence of the Holy Land, proclaimed, as it was, with all the authority of the Head of Christendom, endowed with all the plenitude of Papal indulgence, necessarily possessed a special attraction, for it promised him not only remission of his sins, but also the hope that the remission would be gained by exercising those very same deeds of violence and rapine, the commission of which in his daily life had probably brought him to believe that eternal punishment was his just doom.
Small wonder, therefore, that knights and nobles in large numbers endeavoured thus to gain everlasting advantages. Among the French nobility who passed over to La Terre Sainte, Jocelyn II. de Courtenay is numbered.