Angevin Dynasties of Europe 900-1500 Read online

Still Anjou produced one more dynasty, of warrior dukes who fought in the Hundred Years War and tried to claim Naples. Louis I of Anjou fought at the Battle of Poitiers, served as a hostage in England and then invaded Italy as the adopted heir of Queen Johanna. Louis died on this expedition, but his son Louis II also claimed Naples, fighting against the final branch of the Neapolitan Angevin dynasty represented by King Ladislas and Queen Johanna II. Louis II’s wife, Yolanda of Aragon, became a pivotal figure in the Hundred Years War, raising the future king Charles VII and proving a key supporter of Joan of Arc when she turned the tide against the English. This ‘Second House’ of Anjou made good their claim to Provence, which they would retain for most of the 15th century, as well as intermittently ruling Naples.

  Their line culminated with King René of Anjou, himself a figure of European significance through his participation in the Hundred Years War, cultural achievements in literature, art, and chivalric display and most importantly through the geographic scope of his territorial claims. René became Duke of Bar through his mother and Duke of Lorraine in right of his first wife Isabelle of Lorraine even before he became Duke of Anjou, a title he inherited when his older brother died. René then continued the family claim to the throne of Naples, and although he was ultimately unsuccessful, he used the titles King of Sicily and Jerusalem for the rest of his life. Perhaps most importantly, René was also Count of Provence, and it was in Provence that he would spend his final years in calculatedly rustic simplicity, where he and his second wife Jeanne de Laval are still remembered fondly.

  René also continued to accumulate titles and claimed the throne of Aragon, a claim his son nearly made good when he captured Barcelona. René’s grandson René II was pivotal in the destruction of the duchy of Burgundy as an independent entity and allowing it to be absorbed by France, indirectly strengthening the nation that would also absorb the Angevin dominions.

  King René’s connection to the French royal family and his otherwise empty titles gave him the cachet to marry his daughter Margaret to King Henry VI of England and France, reuniting the Plantagenet and Angevin lines. Margaret’s forceful character and struggles in the Wars of the Roses are well documented both in fiction and fact, and form a powerful narrative in 15th-century English history. Her ultimately tragic end forms part of the final failure of the Plantagenets and Angevins in their royal ambitions.

  Although René’s descendants through his daughter Yolande of Bar did endure as French nobility, the death of his sons meant that his possessions were taken by the French crown. At the same time, the overthrow of the Plantagenets by the Tudors in England meant that all the Angevin lines had failed as independent political entities, bringing their extraordinary story to a close.

  CHAPTER 1 – THE ORIGINS OF ANJOU

  THE CITY THAT BECAME Angers had its origins in the important Roman city of Juliomagus in the province of Gaul, roughly modern France. The inhabitants of the area had been called the Andegavensi, and this older name superseded Juliomagus to give the city and the territory along the lower course of the river Loire the names they keep today, Angers and Anjou.1 The Roman legacy underpins everything in medieval Europe, since the European provinces of Rome retained a linguistic and cultural affinity that endured throughout the medieval period and beyond. The history we will be examining springs from Roman cities such as Angers, Tours, Poitiers and Le Mans, which retained many characteristics from their Roman origin, and which do not have parallels in England. It was a more organized, urban society than England that produced the Angevins.2

  In the tumult after the collapse of the Roman Empire and the migration of new peoples to every corner of Europe, Roman institutions and terminology endured as the only way to articulate concepts of government and authority. The Latin words for the Emperor’s deputies such as dux, comites and vicecomes stayed in use and became ‘duke’, ‘count’ and ‘viscount’, though with different meanings in a post-imperial age. When in the 8th century a Germanic ruler was successful enough to unite France, Germany and Italy into a very loose but nevertheless real polity, inevitably the conceptual framework and language used to describe him derived from the Roman Empire. This was true in the most literal way when on Christmas Day 800 the king of the Franks and conqueror of the Lombards, Visigoths, Magyars and Huns, known in his own lifetime as ‘Charles the Great’, was crowned in Rome by the pope as the new Roman Emperor. We know him by the Latinized form ‘Charlemagne’ and call his empire the ‘Holy Roman Empire’ to distinguish it from the classical Roman Empire. Charlemagne was able to pass his empire intact to his son Louis the Pious, but by the next generation it had splintered into three pieces, and it is here that we must look for the earliest history of Anjou.

  The political system that emerged from the 9th century was focused on the office of the ‘count’. This had a particular definition in the kingdom of the Franks, which included Anjou and would become France. The count held an ‘honour’ – a word still used at the end of the 11th century by the contemporary Angevin count, Fulk Réchin, to describe his inheritance – which was a portion of land providing him with revenues through tolls and taxes to perform his many duties, including defending his county, administering justice to those who lived there and responding to the ban or general military summons of the king if he was needed. He swore an oath of loyalty to the king, and despite all the vicissitudes of the French monarchy over the centuries, this idea that the French king had authority over all the lands in what we think of as France, even when they were ruled by another king, never faded away entirely.

  In the 9th century, kings still attempted to maintain a centralized authority and the counts were visited by royal inspectors, but this broke down by the end of the century. More importantly, possession of an honour, which had been considered a personal grant by the king, was by the end of the century hereditary, and the great provincial dynasties rose from these honours. The king did seek to exercise some control by granting immunities to comital authority to various bishops and abbeys, and regional counts did still attend the king’s court, but for most purposes the counts were independent.3

  The period from the death of Charlemagne (in 814) until the 11th century was a time of warring states in which territories nominally subordinate to the king or emperor struggled constantly to defend their borders, increase their territory and resist attempts to enforce any kind of suzerainty over them. In this period, there was no king of ‘France’, only a ‘king of the Franks’ who directly ruled a tiny area, and political units such as Flanders, Normandy, Brittany, Maine, Anjou, Blois, Champagne, Aquitaine, Toulouse, Provence and Burgundy were of almost equal importance. The history of this period reads as an endless succession of raids, sieges and the occasional battle interspersed with peace treaties and, more importantly, marriage alliances.

  This period was formerly known as the ‘Dark Ages’, a term coined in the 14th century by Francesco Petrarch to compare the enlightened age in which he lived with the primitive period between the fall of Rome and his own time (we shall meet Petrarch again when his ideas about Angevin Naples were expressed in similarly vivid terms). Although we have limited information about what was happening in this period, it did see several important technological developments that would have a profound effect on European history. These included agricultural innovations such as the horse collar, which allowed the use of heavier ploughs to turn the heavy soil of regions like northern France and bring more land under cultivation. This supported a larger population with greater prosperity, and contributed to the formation of population centres for the tiny minority of elites to fight over, in turn promoting more centralized government.4

  There were also military innovations in this period that had significant social consequences for our story. In the 9th century, local rulers covered northern France with small fortified wooden or stone houses, and the ‘castellans’ who controlled them used these castles as bases to dominate the surrounding territory.5 For centuries to follow, castles assumed a dominant posit
ion in warfare that was not lost until the 16th century. The castle is the iconic building of the Middle Ages, more so even than the cathedral, and medieval warfare consisted largely of campaigns to take castles and pillaging raids around them.

  These technological innovations were matched by a corresponding social innovation with an equally profound legacy: the feudal system. At its most basic, feudalism began as a means by which a leader gave land to a follower in return for military service. This began in the lawless period of Viking invasions when local leaders were given land to finance the defence of their territory. The fact that they now built castles, which needed to be manned and defended, gradually led to the existence of a military class whose primary role was to fight, and thus began a fully realized social structure that provided the framework for medieval Europe until the 15th century.

  Perhaps the most important fact about feudalism, and one that may not be readily apparent, is that it was always a reciprocal obligation: the lord had obligations to his vassal as well as the other way round. We may want to assume that one person performing homage to another and becoming a vassal always indicated a subordinate role and by implication a dependent position, but the true situation allowed more ambiguity. For example, a lord’s acceptance of his vassal’s homage for a fief also indicated his acceptance of the vassal’s rights to the fief, and precluded his interfering with its governance except in specific circumstances. Almost all the land that makes up modern France was nominally held from the French king, but the unruly counts of Blois, Anjou, and Flanders, not to mention the more powerful dukes of Normandy, Aquitaine and Brittany, basically ruled their lands as independent territories. They were perfectly willing to involve the king in their constant struggles with each other if they felt it gave an advantage, but they seldom did his bidding in any way and the king could only intervene through military force. These subtleties of feudal law would become decisive in 200 years when the Angevins’ complicated feudal relationships shaped the destiny of their empire.

  The final technological development to concern us was the technique of a horseman delivering a charge with a fixed lance, exponentially increasing the force of the blow. The programme of training required to learn this technique, with its concomitant developments in horse breeding and military hardware, led to an entirely new kind of warrior, the knight. The technique of charging with a couched lance had a spectacular beginning in the 11th century when the Normans used this innovation to achieve their amazing success in England, Italy and the Holy Land. Its effectiveness was recognized at the time. Anna Comnena, daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Alexius Comnenus (who was first bested by the Normans only to become their uneasy ally on the First Crusade), wrote in her history of Alexius’s reign that the force of a Norman cavalry charge could ‘make a hole in the walls of Babylon’ (although this is often quoted, usually the rest of the sentence is omitted: ‘For a Frank on horseback is invincible, and would even make a hole in the walls of Babylon, but directly he gets off his horse, anyone who likes can make sport of him’).6

  Old ethnic divisions remained from the time of the barbarian invasions after the fall of the Roman Empire, and Brittany, Aquitaine and Burgundy retained a distinct cultural identity, as did the two ‘Frankish’ kingdoms of Austrasia and Neustria. The term France (Francia) was in use by the 10th century, usually to mean the land between the Loire and Lorraine (then known as Lotharingia, the German portion of Charlemagne’s former empire), or sometimes in a more restricted sense to mean the land between the Seine and Lorraine, the area actually ruled by the French king until the 13th century.7 Yet the seeds of what we think of as France were already planted, since despite a lack of ethnic identity some sense of political cohesion remained from the wreckage of Charlemagne’s empire. In the 10th and 11th centuries, regional lords recognized that they had political obligations to the king of the Franks, and this would ultimately lead to the unification of almost the entire region into a single entity by the end of the 15th century.

  In the charters of the mid-10th century the king was initially called simply rex, but by the end of the century he took the title rex Francorum or king of the Franks. This change exhibits the tension between two ideas: on the one hand, the king acknowledged that he only ruled the lands of the Franks (between the Loire and Lotharingia), but on the other, and more importantly, that he did in fact rule all the Franks.8 There would be no king of ‘France’ until 1254, when the concept arose that the king ruled an abstract political entity rather than a people.9

  Thus in the 9th century the two great powers of Western Europe were the Emperor and the king of the Franks, a situation that continued until the 11th century when the Norman kings of England became a third great power. The Normans had their origins in the Viking raids, one of the great migrations of peoples that characterized the end of the Roman Empire and the early Middle Ages. Beginning in the 9th century, the Vikings devastated the British Isles and large portions of northern France, and ultimately founded an independent kingdom in England, a substantial colony in Ireland, and most importantly for our purposes, a permanent settlement in France. They gave their name, ‘Northmen’ or ‘Normans’, to the land where they settled, Normandy. Their annexation of this territory was formally recognized by the king of the Franks in 911, and their leader given the title of duke. With such an aggressive new enemy permanently established nearby, the count responsible for the vast area around Angers, Tours and Blois could no longer spare any attention for his lands bordering Brittany and delegated his authority to vice-counts or ‘viscounts’. This is the origin of the dynasties of Blois and Anjou.

  Although we do know something about this early period from ecclesiastical records, charters and a few chronicles, only in the 11th and 12th centuries did anyone attempt to write a history of the region. With the benefit of hindsight, these historians could focus on the regions and figures that would become important and add an extra dash of legend, prophecy and moralizing to highlight key figures. Unsurprisingly, the Angevins, who achieved two crowns in the 12th century, attracted chroniclers eager to show the origins of this great family. What distinguishes the Angevins is the variety of their intriguing ancestors, who inspired richly inventive stories.

  Jean of Marmoutier’s Chronica de Gestis Consulum Andegavorum (Chronicle of the Deeds of the Counts of Anjou) gives us a very detailed and frequently imaginary account of the early Angevins.10 Chroniclers at the monastery of Marmoutier had recorded genealogies and short biographies of the Angevin counts over the centuries, and we know the names of Abbot Odo and Fulk V’s chaplain, Thomas of Loches, as early authors, but it was the monk Jean who gathered all the previous material and created a new version between 1164 and 1173. It is not coincidental that someone should choose these years, the height of Henry II’s power as king of England and ruler of an empire that stretched from Scotland to the Pyrenees, to produce a flattering account of Henry’s ancestors, so in addition to the caution that should be applied to trusting an author writing a century or more after the events he describes, we must also consider Jean’s natural wish to please the most powerful ruler in Europe. Jean completed his work by producing an even more glowing biography of Henry’s father Geoffrey Plantagenet, which we will return to below.

  In the 12th century, no less than at the time of Charlemagne, an upstart family in possession of political power must be in want of a pedigree, and this pedigree must inevitably come from Rome. The Deeds of the Counts of Anjou (or the Gesta, as it is usually known) created an ancestor for them, a forester called Tortulf, though immediately the chronicler takes pains to explain that his name was actually Torquatius as he was descended from a Roman family, and he was called Tortulfus by the Bretons, who were ignorant of the proper use of the old Roman name. He tells us that Tortulf was appointed forester by Charles the Bald, Charlemagne’s grandson and the last effective ruler of Francia in the 9th century, in the same year he expelled the Normans from Anjou and from his whole realm. Indeed, throughout the early sections of th
e Gesta the principal enemies haunting the borders of the French king are the Normans.

  Jean is correct here, because the Normans, terrifying pagan invaders who caused untold devastation, were the principal enemy of the Frankish lands throughout the 9th century. Yet we must not forget that the Gesta was written in the mid-12th century when these same Normans, now Christians, had conquered England with the pope’s blessing and established a powerful monarchy that the Angevins had taken through inheritance and battle. These references to the early Norman pillagers can be read in two ways. Certainly the Normans and Angevins had no love for each other: the Normans were the greatest Angevin enemy, even more so than the Bretons or the Blésois (the rulers of Blois), and the Normans were the only enemy the Angevins didn’t defeat outright. It would not be surprising if an Angevin chronicler chose to emphasize the unsavoury past of the Normans. Yet Henry II was the son of an Angevin father and a Norman mother, as his mother Matilda was daughter of Henry I and granddaughter of William the Conqueror. Henry II completely assimilated the Norman identity when he took the English throne, a sensible decision since the realm he ruled was emphatically Anglo-Norman, and Anjou formed only a small part of his domains.

  This then gives us another reading of the Gesta: the wild savagery and invincibility attributed to the Normans is a compliment to Henry II’s descent and the strength of the people he ruled. There might have been more need to flatter the Normans at this time than any other, when we consider that Normandy had been conquered by Geoffrey Plantagenet and the Anglo-Norman kingdom had fallen to the Angevins. Normandy’s independent history was nearly finished, and by the 13th-century chroniclers found it necessary to make excuses for the Normans’ lack of military ability.

  The intertwining of Angevins and Normans lay several centuries in the future, so let us return to the very beginning of the Angevin line and Tortulf. The chronicler tells us that Tortulf received a grant of land on the border with Brittany, which could be based on fact, since the aggression of the Bretons in the 9th century led to the creation of a defensive military district based on Angers that was assigned to Robert the Strong (ancestor of the Capetian kings, the future allies, then rivals, of the Angevins), and if there was a Tortulf he may have been Robert’s vassal.