Angevin Dynasties of Europe 900-1500 Read online

  The Gesta names Tortulf’s son as Ingelgarius, and here we are on firmer ground since there is evidence that this person did exist. The Angevins themselves, in the form of Fulk Réchin when he chronicled his family in the late 11th century11, began the Angevin line with Ingelgarius and said he became the first count of the Angevins in the 9th century, though this seems to anticipate matters. We might think this is direct evidence that Tortulf didn’t exist, as Fulk Réchin would certainly have known about him, but in fact Fulk stated that he was listing all the previous Angevin counts, not all his ancestors.12 We know almost nothing about Ingelgarius and what the Gesta says seems designed to weave him into the subsequent Angevin story rather than a true account. Yet what the Gesta tells us is instructive: he is said to have distinguished himself fighting the Normans when they attacked Tours. Two key themes of later Angevin history thus come into play: the importance of the city of Tours, and rivalry with the Normans. Typically the Gesta embellishes the story, and reports that Ingelgarius performed his heroic deeds against the Normans to gain the favour of the widow of the lord of Chateau-Landon, though this seems more an intrusion of 12th-century chivalric romance than anything genuine. Whatever reward Ingelgarius may have received from the widow, the Gesta also tells us that his deeds at Tours were rewarded by the archbishop, who allowed Ingelgarius to marry his niece Adelais and granted him the castle of Amboise.

  Although historians have tended not to believe a word of what the Gesta says on this subject, the stories are quite important since they delineate from the beginning what will be the most important Angevin concerns for centuries. From the earliest times the Angevins were defined by their territorial expansion. Ingelgarius was given the eastern half of Anjou by the Bishop of Angers and charged with protecting it from the Normans, but he began to look elsewhere. In fact, it is remarkable how seldom Angers appears in the early stories, and this is telling because it shows just how secure the counts were in their capital. Although the old Roman citadel of Angers was the source of the early Angevins’ authority, and it was the strength of this base that helps account for their increasing power elsewhere from 920–96013, we only hear about it when something of significance – which is almost always to say something bad – happens, and that is only rarely. This allowed the counts to turn their attention elsewhere.

  This was particularly marked by their desire to acquire Tours. Tours was the metropolis of central France and the site of the shrine of St Martin – the Roman soldier from Pannonia (modern Hungary) who was the founder saint of French Christianity – as well as the seat of Gregory of Tours who wrote the first history of the Franks. Tours was also a vital trading centre and should have become a focus for regional power, which in fact it did, but not for its own region: the religious prestige and financial importance of St Martin’s city were harnessed first by the counts of Blois and then the counts of Anjou. Angers too was a prosperous and important city, but Tours was the key to the region, and it was the domination of Tours that gave the Angevin counts the edge in their struggles with their adversaries.

  Fulk the Red: the First Angevin Count

  These hazy speculations about the origins of the Angevins end with Ingelgarius though, because with his son Fulk the Red the Angevins burst into the verifiable historical record, and in what would become their characteristic name and colour (red hair being a mark of the Angevins for centuries). Fulk the Red appears as a signatory to a charter of 886, and by 898 he was named in another charter as the vicomte of Anjou, though he may not have received the title until a decade or two later. He also refers to himself as the ‘son of Ingelgarius’, verifying his father’s name. By 920 or 930 he styled himself Fulk Count of the Angevins, and is thus indisputably the first Angevin count.14

  Calling Fulk ‘Count of Anjou’ would be anachronistic: only in the reign of Geoffrey Martel (1040–1060) do we see that title.15 As noted above, there was no King of England, only a king of the English, and the same for the King of the Franks (they weren’t even ‘French’ at this point), the Duke of the Normans and the Count of the Angevins. There was a concept of places called ‘Francia’, ‘England’ and ‘Normandy’, but not until later was the ruler seen to rule the land, rather than the people who lived in it. This idea seems to have started from the bottom up, and there were counts of Anjou and dukes of Normandy in the 11th century, but only in the 13th century do we see the shift in perception that the kings of England and France ruled an intangible but real country, rather than being the leader of a particular people. This has enormous philosophical implications as it creates the idea of a country that must be defended and which has borders that become defined, rather than the more flexible of idea of territory that we see in the 11th century.

  Fulk the Red was the lay abbot of St Aubin in Angers and treasurer of the abbey of St Martin of Tours, providing a religious and financial dimension to his authority that was a key part of the Angevins’ rise from viscount to count. Fulk formalized the Angevin domination of Tours by adding the title Viscount of Tours to his religious position in St Martin’s church no later than 898, which meant he took military responsibility for defending the city.16 In accepted practice, Fulk also used the revenue of St Martin of Tours to reward his supporters and extend his power.

  Compared to Tortulf or Ingelgarius we are in a different realm with Fulk the Red, and although we know little enough about him, what is important is that Fulk’s identity is verified in written charters. As well as confirming Ingelgarius’s name he tells us the name of his wife, Roscilla, and his sons Guy, Ingelgarius and Fulk ‘the Good’, who became the next count of the Angevins. Continuing the chain of associations that began with Ingelgarius and the castle of Amboise, the Gesta tells us that Fulk the Red obtained castles as his wife’s dowry, most notably the castle of Loches. Although rebuilt by Fulk the Red’s great-grandson around 1000, this is still one of the oldest castles in Europe, retaining parts of its 11th-century form even now, and one which will become indelibly associated with the Angevins. This association of the Angevins with castles will become one of their hallmarks, and in another century the Angevins would transform castles into the lynchpin of medieval warfare.

  The mere existence of written charters involving Fulk the Red is instructive. The Angevin counts, like others in the 10th century, were beginning to arrogate powers to themselves that once had been claimed only by kings. They issued these charters using the monks of St Aubin in Angers as scribes, and the language in these charters is informative as well, as the counts refer to their rights and their treasury, demonstrating that they no longer believe these things are in any way held from the king, though they still owe him allegiance.17 However, despite these connections with important ecclesiastical and civic authorities, the Angevins in the 10th century were overshadowed by their rivals in Normandy and Blois until the time of Fulk the Red’s son, Fulk the Good.

  Fulk the Good: ‘an illiterate king is a crowned ass’

  Given the later sinister and overtly diabolical qualities that were ascribed to the Angevins, it may seem surprising that the saintly Fulk the Good (941–960) appears among their ancestors, though a cynic would point out that 12th-century chroniclers attempting to compensate for the reputation of contemporary Angevins shrewdly invented him. Fulk was said to have dressed as a cleric and preferred sitting with the canons at Tours to presiding over his court. His devotion to quiet study and reading attracted the derision of King Louis IV, who mocked him, but Fulk responded tartly with the first memorable Angevin quote, ‘An illiterate king is a crowned ass.’18

  Although most of the stories about Fulk the Good come from a version of the Gesta prepared 200 years after the event by Geoffrey Plantagenet’s chaplain Breton d’Amboise, who copied them from the Miracles of St Martin of Tours, the quote was certainly well known to contemporaries and firmly associated with the Angevins. William of Malmesbury, writing before 1129, reports that the youthful King Henry I of England, who was said to be the best educated of his family, frequentl
y cited it to his father William the Conqueror19 (with what consequences one can only imagine – perhaps it isn’t a coincidence that Henry received no territory when his father died).

  This quote also highlights a tension that remained throughout the Middle Ages, about what made a good ruler. Was it appropriate for a king (or count) to devote himself to study and sit in a cloister like a monk? Wasn’t a king supposed to be a warrior and defend his people? This would frequently be the reason that women were excluded from the throne, as it was believed they couldn’t lead armies, and if a king were more interested in books than battle, what use was he? The best example of this tension came 400 years later in relation to the Angevin King Robert the Wise of Naples, a direct descendant of Fulk the Good. Robert produced a vast quantity of sermons and two theological treatises, had the most impressive royal library in Europe and was chosen by the poet Petrarch to examine him publicly to ensure he warranted being crowned as the first poet laureate since Roman times. Critics, including most harshly Dante, mocked Robert for his learning and piety. The situation was almost too neatly summed up, since Robert’s elder brother Louis had renounced the throne to become a Franciscan (and was later canonized), whereas Robert became king but chose to give sermons. As Dante said, ‘But you wrench to a religious order him born to gird a sword’ and ‘You make a king of one that is fit for sermons’.20

  For Fulk the Good, as with Robert, the only thing that matters is how successful a ruler he was, and Fulk was successful in forming an alliance with Theobald of Blois against Brittany. This reversal of traditional Angevin enmity towards Blois gave Fulk a free hand to dominate the important city of Nantes, where he ruthlessly eliminated his rivals in a fashion seemingly at odds with his saintly persona.

  So how then did the legend of Fulk ‘the Good’ arise? We don’t know if Fulk really did wear a clerical habit and sit with the canons of the cathedral, and he may or may not have felt that an illiterate king was a crowned ass, but one modern historian of the Angevins believes that what defined Fulk was his resolution of the Angevins’ historical strife with Blois. This was sufficient to seal Fulk’s reputation as a peacemaker and earn him the sobriquet of ‘the Good’, and Jean of Marmoutier exercised his creative talents to provide anecdotes emphasizing this quality. Another factor may have been Fulk’s progeny, since his second son Guy became bishop of Le Puy in 975 (though only through military intervention), and Drogo, his youngest and favourite son, was highly educated in the liberal arts and succeeded his brother as bishop, perhaps retrospectively bestowing a reputation for saintliness and learning on his father. This reputation – for learning at least, though the saintliness swiftly disappeared – would remain with the Angevins throughout the 12th century. Yet in one of his charters Fulk’s son mentioned Fulk’s ‘bitter and fearful deeds’, so we shouldn’t accept the legend of the saintly cleric uncritically.21

  Geoffrey Greymantle: from Myth to Reality

  Despite the documentary evidence and legendary material for Fulk the Red and Fulk the Good, it was Fulk the Good’s son Geoffrey Greymantle who became the first iconic member of the Angevin dynasty. Geoffrey succeeded as count in 960 and passed into legend as a mighty warrior and mainstay of the first Capetian king in France, Hugh Capet. Geoffrey’s relationship with Hugh Capet and participation in the larger affairs of the kingdom are documented, and this connection resonated down the centuries so that Geoffrey became the most important mythic forebear of the Angevins, and every tale whether true or imagined from the Angevin past was attributed to him.22

  However, in the Gesta the deeds ascribed to Geoffrey seem almost wholly fantastical and quite distinct from the facts that are known about him. Take the story of how Geoffrey Greymantle got his name. Jean of Marmoutier relates that the Danes invaded Flanders shortly after Geoffrey’s succession as count and laid waste all of northern France, before turning towards Paris. Hugh Capet summoned his nobles to assist him, but before they could arrive the Danish champion, Ethelulf, a giant described as a ‘new Goliath’, arrived at the gates of Paris and challenged the French to send a champion to fight him. Ethelulf defeated and killed every French warrior sent out to meet him, and Hugh forbade anyone else to face the giant. Geoffrey Greymantle was already en route to Paris to respond to the king’s summons when he heard of Ethelulf’s challenge. Travelling in secret, Geoffrey crossed the Seine and met Ethelulf in combat; after throwing the giant from his horse with his lance, Geoffrey took his sword and like a ‘second David’ to Ethelulf’s ‘new Goliath’ beheaded the Dane and gave his head to a miller to take to Paris.

  The miller duly delivered the trophy to Hugh Capet and told the king that although he did not know the identity of the giant-slayer, he would recognize him again if he saw him. When all the nobles convened in Paris for the king’s court, the miller recognized Geoffrey immediately, and seizing his tunic of coarse grey cloth told the king that the man in the ‘grey mantle’ was their saviour. Whereupon Hugh Capet decreed that he should henceforth be known as Geoffrey ‘Greymantle’.23 The chronicler’s highlighting of Geoffrey’s coarse, poor clothing portrays the Angevin counts as plain, old-fashioned warriors in the best Roman fashion.

  The Gesta then describes Geoffrey’s other military adventures on behalf of the king, and states that he was the king’s standard bearer. Here there is an interesting conflation between two distinct fictional traditions. In the Song of Roland, which was written down around 1100 although it drew on earlier oral tradition, Charlemagne’s standard bearer is stated to be Geoffrey of Anjou. This is patently anachronistic since no source names a count of Anjou in the time of Charlemagne, and certainly not one named Geoffrey. The Geoffrey of Anjou in the Song of Roland is clearly meant to be Geoffrey Greymantle, despite the epic being set two centuries before Geoffrey lived. Was this because Geoffrey Greymantle was Hugh Capet’s standard bearer, and so this epic describing Charlemagne’s court drew on contemporary personalities and offices? Or was Geoffrey Greymantle said by Jean of Marmoutier to be Hugh Capet’s standard bearer precisely because a Geoffrey of Anjou is reported to have fulfilled that role in the Song of Roland? This beautifully illustrates the interplay of fact and fiction that informs early medieval sources.

  The Gesta’s other tales are a repetitive cycle of battles in which Geoffrey is victorious in single combat against various enemies, mixed with the usual pious stories that clerics loved, such as the fact that Geoffrey obtained a piece of the girdle of the Virgin Mary and placed it in the church at Loches. The Gesta is also heavily influenced by classical sources, most importantly Sallust. As a partisan of Julius Caesar, Sallust emphasized the importance of new ways of thinking and governing, and how old institutions and rulers could be moribund. This provided a perfect theme for the Gesta, which wanted to show how a dynamic new dynasty of rulers deserved their position because of their noble deeds, rather than a long pedigree. This seems to be the reason for ascribing so many adventures to Geoffrey Greymantle, but there is no evidence for any of them being true. Certainly Fulk Réchin, Geoffrey’s great-grandson who lived less than 100 years after Geoffrey’s death, had very little to say about him in his history of his ancestors.24

  But what were his tangible accomplishments? Geoffrey’s activities seem very similar to his father’s; he was victorious in struggles with the counts of Rennes and imposed his will on Nantes, and he also struggled with William Duke of Aquitaine, eventually acquiring the castle of Loudon, which he held as a fief of the duke. This is an example of the ambiguity of the feudal system, since Geoffrey performed homage to William for Loudon, which might be interpreted as an indication that Geoffrey was in an inferior position. Indeed, the contemporary Aquitainian historian Adémar of Chabannes reports that William had defeated Geoffrey and forced him to perform homage. We should think about what this means: Loudon had always belonged to the Dukes of Aquitaine, but now it belonged to Geoffrey Greymantle. Geoffrey’s homage to William acknowledged that he held the castle in return for certain services to William, but it also
confirmed his hereditary possession of it. This sounds much more like Angevin expansion than a defeat. Geoffrey’s son Fulk Nerra in turn inherited Loudon and proceeded to annex further Aquitainian territory, namely the Gâtinais and Saintonge, also performing homage to the Duke of Aquitaine for these lands, but it is useful to compare the obligations Fulk owed with the obligations of the Duke’s other vassals. One, Hugh of Lusignan, was required to go on expeditions with his overlord and ask his permission to marry. Fulk did none of this.25

  We are still in a very murky period historically, yet we can see how Anjou was growing town by town and castle by castle. Most tangibly of all, Geoffrey probably began the first stone donjon at Loches, stamping Angevin power on the southern border of Touraine. Loches is quite far from Angers and is a demonstration of how wide-ranging Angevin ambitions remained.

  Fulk Nerra: the Embodiment of His Age

  Geoffrey died in 987 during the siege of Marçon, and the process by which, slowly but surely, the Angevin rulers have emerged from obscurity climaxes with Geoffrey’s son Fulk Nerra, of whom we have a reasonably well-documented life. As Sir Richard Southern remarked in his Making of the Middle Ages, ‘by 987 the family was ready to emerge from its legendary and epic age onto the stage of history.’26 This is not to say Fulk isn’t also the subject of fanciful stories, but the events of his long reign can be outlined with some certainty, even if we can’t fill in the details. This is a somewhat tepid introduction to one of the towering figures of the Middle Ages, a man not so much wreathed in legend as a man who was a legend.