Angevin Dynasties of Europe 900-1500 Page 4

  Fulk’s name is one of the most obscure things about him, as he wasn’t dubbed Fulk ‘Nerra’ until the 12th century and no one is quite sure why. In his lifetime Fulk was always called Fulk ‘the Pilgrim’ or Fulk ‘the Jerusalemite’ in reference to his pilgrimages to Jerusalem. The new title was adopted by 12th-century chroniclers when it became necessary to distinguish Fulk from his great-grandson Fulk V, who not only went to Jerusalem but also became its king, but no explanation is given for what the word means. ‘Nerra’ is now always accepted to be some variation of the Latin nero or niger (that is, ‘black’), and in English Fulk is often called ‘Fulk the Black’. Yet even if we accept that it means ‘black’, Nerra seems to be a feminine form.27

  I wonder if this might not give us a clue to the term’s origin. In Occitan, which in Fulk’s time was spoken in Poitou up to the borders of Anjou, an area in which Fulk was expanding his power and may have caused considerable fear, the word for black is negra. Moreover, in Occitan – uniquely among Romance languages – ‘o’ is the feminine ending instead of ‘a’, which may have caused some confusion over the correct form to use, and suggests that we seek the meaning of ‘Nerra’ in Occitan rather than Latin. Whatever the origin of the word Nerra, modern historians assume that Fulk was called ‘the Black’ because he was so terrifying: he was ferocious in battle, terrible in his anger and committed horrifying acts of violence. Of course, even if Nerra is a form of ‘black’, the name could just have easily arisen because Fulk had dark colouring rather than red hair like his ancestors, though this seems unlikely since the name only came about long after Fulk’s death.

  Kate Norgate, the great 19th-century English historian of the Angevins, adopted a more poetic phraseology and called Fulk the ‘Black Falcon’. Pleasing as that designation is, it seems to me a liberty to equate Fulk’s name in Latin, Fulco, with falco or falcon, especially when the French spelling of Fulk’s name, Foulque is actually cognate with the name of another bird. This is the foulque macroule or coot, but calling a figure of Fulk’s significance, particularly one so bellicose, the ‘Black Coot’ is simply unthinkable!

  Yet there is a 12th-century precedent for Norgate’s choice. Fulk V, who by marrying Queen Melisende became King of Jerusalem and caused Fulk Nerra to receive his new name, may well have been called the ‘Falcon’, or possibly the ‘Coot’. Melisende’s sumptuous psalter is in the British Library, and in addition to having a note with the date of her husband’s death in the manuscript, on the beautiful Byzantine ivory panels that bind the psalter the word herodias is carved like a title above an engraved falcon. In Latin the word for coot is usually fulica, but herodias is also sometimes used to mean coot – as well as for heron, stork, owl or gyrfalcon. The psalter is believed to have been a gift from Fulk to Melisende after a period of turmoil in their relationship, and given the proud position of the word herodias on the back cover, as well as the image of a falcon, it is much more likely that Fulk was known as the ‘falcon’ than the ‘coot’.

  To return to Fulk Nerra, he is always cited as the epitome of the violent, unrestrained medieval character – furious in war, uninhibited in repentance, liable to excesses of violence followed by equal extremes of piety. Perhaps these traits are an accurate representation of Fulk, yet this is just as illuminating about historiography in the modern world as in the medieval. Historians in the 19th century particularly liked to amplify tales of Fulk’s violence, especially in a highly influential history of the Crusades by Michaud that features an engraving by Gustave Doré showing Fulk haunted by the spirits of those he has slain, prompting his pilgrimages to Jerusalem. Fulk’s terrible reputation became fixed in the 19th century, and now some modern historians casually refer to him as ‘terrifying’ without any enquiry into what lies behind this.

  So what did Fulk Nerra do that made him so terrible and respected? Through his military efforts he elevated Anjou from a lesser county into the first rank of northern French powers, and he began at a very early age. Indeed, in keeping with the medieval love of Roman associations, Fulk would definitely seem to warrant the tag of adulescens carnifex (teenage butcher) given to Pompey the Great. Fulk won a great victory against Conan Count of Rennes at Conquereuil in 992 when he was little more than a teenager, and in an age when pitched battles were uncommon occurrences, such a victory enhanced his reputation forever. This is despite the fact that the course of the battle did not flatter his grasp of strategy – the Angevin cavalry fell into a trap, blundering into a concealed ditch filled with spikes, and nearly lost the battle, though they rallied finally to kill the Breton count and inflict great slaughter on their enemies.28

  Despite this victory over the Bretons, and after Fulk the Good’s focus on Brittany and Geoffrey Greymantle’s dalliance with Aquitaine, Fulk turned his attention firmly back towards Tours, where he also gained renown for the defeat of the traditional Angevin enemy, the Count of Blois, at the battle of Pontlevoy in 1016. Again, the performance of the Angevins was not entirely convincing: they were completely overwhelmed by their enemies (Fulk himself was wounded and fled) and lost the battle, but in the aftermath when the Blésois had dispersed to pillage the dead, Fulk’s allies from Maine led by Count Herbert Wake-the-Dog appeared and utterly routed the Blésois.29 Yet the circumstances were of little importance to Fulk’s reputation when the facts were so stark, as Anjou’s enemies to the west and east had been comprehensively defeated in the bloodiest fashion.

  Fulk then seized Saumur and later, in what seems to us an act of base ingratitude, he imprisoned his old ally Hebert Wake-the-Dog for two years in the castle of Saintes and demanded his homage for Maine.30 This was the opposite of Geoffrey Greymantle’s homage for Loudon: Geoffrey performed homage for a territory he had seized, confirming that it was his in perpetuity, whereas Herbert was now forced to pay homage to another ruler for a county previously free of obligations. William of Malmesbury said that this betrayal of Count Herbert was the sole stain on Fulk’s reputation – a view not taken by any other modern or contemporary historian, who delight in elaborating Fulk’s numerous crimes – though as a chronicler of the Normans writing nearly a century after Fulk’s death, William had never experienced the full fury of Fulk’s aggression. The chronicler of St Florent of Saumur took a different view, saying that Fulk and his son Geoffrey were only just inferior to wild beasts in strength, ferocity and cunning.

  Regardless, Fulk’s deeds laid the foundation for future Angevin expansion in every direction. The most important component was the final Angevin domination of Tours. This was by no means inevitable, because after Hugh Capet’s death the new French king Robert II married Bertha of Blois and inclined to the Blésois, meaning Fulk lost the staunchest ally his father had possessed.31 Though Fulk himself did not live to absorb Tours into the Angevin domains, he completed all the groundwork and his son finished the task. Fulk’s battles played their part, but he achieved this most strikingly through a transformation of medieval warfare that had consequences for centuries: the use of castles for aggression rather than defence.

  The use of forward bases was not unknown before Fulk, but Fulk is the identifiable figure who turned the defensive stone fortification into a potent weapon against his enemies. Like all brilliant ideas this seems simple: instead of using castles only for defence, Fulk planted them at points he wished to attack, instantly staking his claim and putting enormous pressure on his opponents. Fulk built Langeais (the earliest known stone donjon in the region, which can still be seen32) twenty kilometres from Tours in 994–5, Montrichard in 1005 to threaten the lord of Saumur’s castle at Pontlevoy and Montboyau a few kilometres from Tours in 1017, amongst many others.

  It can be difficult to appreciate how innovative Fulk’s strategy was. Castles had sprung up in the 9th century during the Viking invasions when Charles the Bald struggled to defend his kingdom, and churches built with stone taken from the old Roman fortifications were dismantled in their turn to build new fortresses. The existence of so many castles meant that be
sieging and taking castles had become a vital component of warfare and territorial control. Yet Fulk made the mental leap that if a castle controlled territory around it, why not also build castles on land you wished to control, rather than only on land you already controlled? Fulk’s descendant Richard the Lionheart did something similar when he built Chateau Gaillard, his ‘saucy castle’, which was so close to Paris that it has been compared to a fist thrust in the face of the French king. Fulk’s castle-building activity sealed his reputation as a military genius at an early date: a contemporary called him elegantissimus bellicus rebus (most adroit in military matters33), and when his descendant Fulk Réchin wrote the history of the Angevins around fifty years later, he included a list of the castles Fulk Nerra built as part of his accomplishments. What was most striking to contemporaries was that these castles were built as part of a coherent policy, and Fulk’s flurry of castles set the stage for the moment when Anjou would be in a strong enough position to annex Tours.

  The early medieval period is filled with other violent warriors and greedy landowners, but we have illustrations of another side of Fulk’s character: Fulk participated in the unrestrained religiosity of the early Middle Ages. This can seem discordant to the modern reader, but particularly around the millennial year 1000, whatever unsavoury activities a person undertook, a fervent religious devotion was also the norm rather than the exception. Fulk established monasteries and gave his patronage to churches in a conventional medieval fashion, but there is also abundant evidence that he was truly pious when it suited him. His pilgrimages to Jerusalem are the great case in point, as he travelled to the Holy Land at least three times and possibly four. The fact that these pilgrimages were probably motivated – as Doré’s illustration shows us – by his awareness of the horrible crimes he had committed would not have seemed incongruous to Fulk or his contemporaries.

  Fulk’s religious exploits also show that in the early 11th century saints were still viewed as inhabiting their shrines personally and being quite particular about how they were treated. When Fulk took Saumur in 1026, he pillaged and burnt everything in the town, not sparing the church of St Florent. He then immediately promised to build the saint a much better church in Angers, and had the saint’s bones put in a boat to be transported. At the point on the river where the boat would have entered Angevin territory it stuck fast and refused to move further, and the monks explained that the saint would not leave his own land. Fulk then built a new church at the spot thus chosen by St Florent, though he decried the ignorance of the saint who refused to be taken to more comfortable surroundings in Angers.34

  This kind of casual blasphemy is also part and parcel of medieval religiosity, and indeed Fulk’s favourite oath gives us a precious example of his direct speech and shows how he was characterized: the Gesta begins his biography by saying, ‘Fulk Nerra, who customarily swore “by God’s souls”’, which seems to relate to a mistaken understanding of the Trinity.35 Yet although Fulk’s charters are peppered with references to his fear of hell and his repentance for his terrible temper, the 12th-century Angevin sources preferred to compare him to Roman models and remove inconvenient or embarrassing attributes.36

  Suppressing any of the stories about Fulk would be a mistake, since they are wonderful. On his first pilgrimage to Jerusalem in c1002, Fulk received a less than hospitable reception from its Muslim custodians, who demanded a large sum from anyone who wished to enter the city, which meant that numerous impoverished Christians were stranded outside the gates unable to complete their journey. We should note that at this time relations between Christians and Muslims were not especially bad: from 1004–1014 there would be a full-blown persecution of Christians under the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim, who ordered the destruction of the church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1009. The pendulum swung back in 1016 when al-Hakim proclaimed his divinity and substituted his own name for that of Allah in prayers, to the utter horror of his Muslim subjects; he became so estranged from other Muslims that he began to heap privileges on Jews and Christians instead. The drama ended when al-Hakim vanished in 1021, most likely murdered by his sister, though the sect of the Druzes believes he will return.37 Fulk’s first pilgrimage came before these difficulties, and he duly paid the toll for himself and the other pilgrims so all could enter the city.

  Next, the custodians forbade the Christians to enter the church of the Holy Sepulchre unless Fulk agreed to urinate on the relic of the True Cross and the tomb where Christ had lain. Despite the outrage this must have caused the Christians, compared with later events this was fairly low-level mischief from the Muslims, who must have scoffed at the idolatry of Christians who revered a piece of wood. Nevertheless, Fulk had the last laugh and bested his tormenters with a stratagem. The Gesta records that Fulk agreed to the condition but, ‘He obtained a ram’s bladder, cleansed it of impurities, filled it with the best white wine and placed it in a convincing place between his thighs. Then, after removing his shoes, he approached the Lord’s tomb, poured the wine over it and was thus allowed to enter freely with all his companions.’ Not only did Fulk visit the tomb, he participated in a miracle when the stone of the tomb grew soft and allowed him to tear out a piece with his teeth and hide it. In addition to the miraculous piece of stone, Fulk also obtained a relic of the True Cross, and founded the abbey at Beaulieu specifically to hold his relics from the Holy Land.38

  That Fulk’s pilgrimages were genuine acts of repentance is borne out by his actions on his final pilgrimage: William of Malmesbury reports that Fulk ordered one servant to drag him around Jerusalem by a halter while another scourged his bare back and Fulk cried out for God’s mercy on a miserable sinner. However, there is no denying that pilgrimages also served a political role. When Fulk travelled to Rome around 1007 he wasn’t only visiting the holy sites, he was also petitioning the pope to consecrate the new abbey of Beaulieu that he had built illegally in the territory of Tours.39

  These were his acts of piety, but why was Fulk considered so terrible? Slaughtering enemies and waging constant warfare were absolutely typical for rulers of this period – and for a long time after – and despite Fulk’s undeniable success he doesn’t seem the most accomplished warrior of the age. He was one of the most persistent though, and his ceaseless attacks on enemies on all sides as well as his pugnacious castle-building programme do mark him out as a bellicose figure even in a time of perpetual aristocratic conflict. Fulk was also implicated in less savoury episodes, as when the king’s adviser Hugh de Beauvais was murdered while out hunting in 1008, and the assassins fled straight to Anjou, leaving little doubt who was behind the attack. In this case it was Fulk’s treason against the king that was much worse than the murder itself, and such revulsion attended the crime that Fulk quickly sued for peace and performed another pilgrimage to Jerusalem to atone.40

  Fulk had notably bad relations with his son and heir Geoffrey Martel, and although this is not unusual in hereditary states, he punctuated them with characteristically hyperbolic episodes. Fulk lived to such a great and active age that Geoffrey Martel was an adult fighting his own battles long before his father died, which could not have been an easy situation. Yet Fulk did give Geoffrey responsibilities, in sharp contrast to what would happen a century later, when Geoffrey Plantagenet and the Empress Matilda fell out catastrophically with Henry I over his refusal to delegate any responsibility to them as his recognized heirs, and even worse consequences followed Henry II’s refusal to delegate sufficient power to his sons in the late 12th century. Geoffrey was active in skirmishes on the border of Poitou with the Duke of Aquitaine, but this was insufficient for his ambitions. When Fulk was away on pilgrimage in 1035, Geoffrey stirred up a rebellion and the count returned to find the gates of Anjou barred against him. Fulk had little trouble suppressing the rebellion, but the punishment he meted out to Geoffrey was terrible indeed, according to William of Malmesbury: ‘Saddled and bridled like a beast of burthen, Geoffrey came crawling to his father’s feet. “Conquered art thou —
conquered, conquered!” shouted the old count, kicking his prostrate son. “Aye, conquered by thee, for thou art my father; but unconquered by all beside!” The spirited answer touched Fulk’s paternal pride, and Geoffrey arose forgiven.’41

  These stories pale into insignificance, though, compared to an event in Fulk’s career that is unique, and tainted his memory forever: he burnt his first wife Elisabeth at the stake in the year 1000. It is said to be this act that prompted Fulk’s first pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

  Fulk married Elisabeth around the time of his accession, and in the usual fashion the marriage was meant to join the interests of neighbouring landowners, as she was the daughter of the Count of Vendôme. After some years she bore a daughter, Adele, and the chronicles all highlight Fulk’s disappointment and need for a son. This was a constant feature of medieval marriage, though Fulk’s method of dissolving the marriage was unprecedented among the greater aristocracy. Interestingly, Elisabeth’s fate, which would seem to be the most lasting stain on Fulk’s reputation and possibly the foundation for the later diabolical legends about the Angevins, has not been highlighted by historians and in most cases has been obscured through further elaboration of the legends. The basis for the story is the Chronicle of St Florent of Saumur, which says that Fulk accused Elisabeth of adultery and burnt her at the stake. From this statement later authors have spun ever more fanciful elaborations.

  Fulk’s best biographer, Louis Halphen, claims the text was copied and elaborated by the monks of St Florent from the initial entry in the chronicle of St Aubin.42 However, the meaning of the text in the History of St Florent is not clear, and modern historians have taken this ambiguity as licence either to embellish the story considerably or simply ignore it. Everything depends on how the text is translated, so giving any translation creates an interpretation of the story. The text, as translated by Fulk’s modern biographer Bernard Bachrach, says: