Bad news for the siblings of a crown prince; but good news, by and large, for the prospects of the dynasty itself. Such, at any rate – if imitation is to be judged the sincerest form of approbation – was the opinion of the Capetians’ former peers. Ferocious and unrelenting were the demands of power among the Franks; and no prince, if he wished to maintain himself in the front rank of greatness, could afford
to overlook a potential competitive advantage. The Capetian drive to forge a coherent domain, one that could be handed down from father to son intact, generation after generation, had not gone unremarked by other lords. There were some, indeed, who had already trumped it. Beyond the royal heartlands that extended around Paris, for instance, bordering the northern seas, there stretched a principality already so compact and unitary that it made the Capetian domain look positively moth-eaten in comparison. Proudly, the counts of Flanders boasted of their origins as lieutenants of the Carolingians; but that was hardly telling all the story. Indeed, as their many enemies saw it, their posing as upholders of the
status quo
was risible: for to their neighbours they were nothing but predators, slippery and ever-ravening, “replete with the venom of viperish guile.”
14
As far back as 862, the first Count of Flanders had begun a long family tradition of brutal opportunism by abducting a princess from under the nose of her royal father; and from that moment on, as count succeeded count, the dynasty had ruthlessly expanded and consolidated its holdings. Indeed, bearing in mind what was evidently a hereditary aptitude for illegality and violence, there was nothing, perhaps, that better illustrated the consistent effectiveness of those who ruled the principality than their ability to box in the ambitions of their own kindred. Only once, in 962, had a count been compelled to hive off some of his holdings to a separate branch of the family – and only then because he was old and his son had just unexpectedly died. The mood of crisis not withstanding, he had still insisted on appointing as his own successor his grandson – who at the time was merely a child. Time had proved this decision the correct one: the dynasty had endured. Indeed, by the time of the Millennium, it was as entrenched and formidable as it had ever been. Potent testimony to what might be won, amid the troubles of the age, by the simple expedient of passing down an inheritance intact to a single heir. Not all the fustian of tradition in which the princes of Flanders continued to adorn themselves could serve entirely to
obscure just how startling had been their achievement in building up, from virtually nothing, a power base quite without precedent in the previous century.
Indeed, as the year 1000 drew nearer, so the entire political framework of the West Frankish kingdom appeared to be splintering and foundering upon the ambitions of rapacious princes. Unlike the counts of Flanders, most of these, as they manoeuvred for advantage, saw not the faintest advantage in claiming legitimacy from the failed institutions of the past. Along the valley of the Loire, for instance, west of the royal stronghold of Orléans, right on the doorstep of the Capetian domain, the very contours of ancient territories had begun to fade from memory, like fields abandoned to scrubland. In their place, patched together out of the plundered rubble of toppled lordships, the foundations of wholly new principalities were being laid: states that would ultimately owe little either to tradition or to mouldering property deeds. Those labouring at such a work of creation, rather than feeling any sense of embarrassment at their parvenu status, preferred instead to exult in it. As why should they not have done? They were proving themselves in the snake-pit to end all snake-pits, after all. What more certain badge of quality than to have pieced together, out of the shards of a ruined order, a state sufficient to prosper and endure? How telling it was that in the decade before the Millennium, and the decades that followed it, the prince who would most triumphantly put the Loire in his shadow bore the title of a county that seemed, in 987, when he ascended to its rule, a mere thing of shreds and patches. Such a principality – rootless, fragmented, lacking any natural boundaries – appeared to the region’s scavengers, as they sniffed at it, easy prey. But they were wrong. Time would more than demonstrate the formidable potential of Anjou.
Its new count, Fulk “Nerra” – “the Black” – claimed descent from a forester. No matter that his immediate predecessors had made a sequence of brilliant and profitable marriages, and that his own mother was a cousin of Hugh Capet, Fulk preferred not to boast
of his connections with the international aristocracy, but rather to emphasise how his family had sprung like a flourishing oak from the rich, deep soil of his beloved Anjou. Generation after generation, the county had been pieced together by a succession of martial counts, each one of them characterised by a ferocious aptitude for selfaggrandisement and a memorable epithet: Fulk the Red, Fulk the Good, Geoffrey Greycloak. What inspired Fulk Nerra’s own nickname – whether the bristling colour of his beard or the notoriously savage quality of his rages – we do not know; but it is certain that he exemplified to the full every attribute of his terrifying family. Although, at seventeen, he was still young when he became count, all his childhood had been preparation for such a moment: for his father, whether amid the business of the court, or the hunt, or the mud and carnage of the battlefield, had been assiduous in steeling him for power. This was just as well: “for new wars,” as one Angevin chronicler observed pithily, “will always break out quickly against new rulers.”
15
Indeed, during the early years of his reign, Fulk Nerra found himself locked in a struggle for survival so desperate that the very existence of Anjou appeared at stake, and only bold measures served ultimately to redeem it. In 991, at Conquereuil, a plain just beyond the northwestern limits of his lands, the young count dared to stake everything upon a single throw: a pitched battle against the most menacing of all his enemies, the Duke of Brittany. The Bretons, “an uncivilised and quick-tempered people, lacking any manners,”
16
and with an authentically barbarous taste for milk, were most dangerous opponents; and yet Fulk it was, amid great slaughter, who ultimately secured the victory. Among the dead left on the battlefield was the Duke of Brittany himself. Fulk Nerra, still only twenty-three, had secured a name for himself as one of the great captains of Christendom.
Evidence for that, ironically enough, lay in the fact that he would hardly ever again have to prove his generalship in open combat. Nothing was regarded by experienced commanders as more jejune than a taste for pitched battles when they were not strictly necessary: for in warfare, as in the habits of daily life, it was self-restraint that was
seen as the truest mark of a man. Renowned for his ferocity Fulk Nerra may have been, but he was even more feared for his guile. Certainly, he was not afraid to be underhand when the situation required it. Kidnappings were a favoured stratagem; poisonings and assassinations too. On one notable occasion, in 1008, Fulk’s agents even dared to ambush a royal hunting party, and strike down the palace chamberlain, a notorious anti-Angevin, in full view of the startled king. Crimes such as this were very much a family tradition: so it was, for instance, that Fulk’s grandfather and namesake, a man who had owed his epithet of “the Good” to his widespread reputation for piety, had not hesitated to rub out his own ward and stepson when the young boy had stood in the way of his interests. Yet Fulk Nerra, even judged by these elevated standards of ruthlessness, brought something new to the arts required of an ambitious prince: brutal and cunning he may have been, but he was also something more. In an era of ceaseless and bewildering change, he knew instinctively how best to turn all the many dramatic upheavals of the age to his own ends. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Fulk had no dread of what were termed by the suspicious “
novae res
”: “new things.” On the contrary – he embraced them.
The proofs of this, raised first in wood and then increasingly, as his reign progressed, in forbidding stone, were to be found everywhere across Anjou. Otto II, riding with his men through the badlands south of Rome, had witnessed the marks of something very similar: an all-consuming drive to throw up fortifications wherever possible that had been termed by the Italians, in their bastard Latin, “
incastellamento
.” This mania had reflected something more than simply a dread of the Saracens: for it had also served to stamp southern Italy very clearly as a land without a king – to Otto’s disgust. Battlements, it had always been taken for granted in Francia, were properly the business of royalty, and royalty alone. How else was the public order of a kingdom to be maintained? An alarming question – and one becoming, even in the lands beyond the Alps, ever less theoretical by the year. As with the silks and jewellery and exotic
cooking ingredients imported by the Amalfitans, so with their fortifications: the Italians knew how to set a trend.
Incastellamento
was spreading northwards.
In West Francia especially, borne upon the general ebbing of royal power, the taboo against private fortresses was increasingly in full retreat. The Capetians, as they struggled to assert their authority over even the patchwork of territories that constituted the royal domain, were hardly in any position to forbid distant princes from raising fortifications of their own. The consequence, sprouting up suddenly across region after region of West Francia, like toadstools from rotten wood, was a great host of strange and unsettling structures, as menacing as they were crude: what would come to be termed in English “castles.” Here, bred of the throes of the Millennium, was yet another far-reaching convulsion – and right at its forefront, testing its limits, was the Count of Anjou.
Fulk’s enthusiasm for castles reflected a typically cold-eyed insight: that their defences might be deployed as tools of aggression. The fortifications raised in Anjou, unlike the much larger “
castella
”which Otto II had ridden past in southern Italy, were designed to intimidate, not protect, the local population. Planted as a forward base in hostile territory, planned as merely one of a whole ring of similar structures, investing an obdurate target and gradually throttling it into submission, a castle founded by Fulk was built to provide shelter for its garrisons, and no one else. The great discovery, one exploited ruthlessly along the whole length of the Angevin marches, was that a fortification might be no less effective for being basic. Castles, in the first revolutionary flush of their existence, provided immediate payback for an often minimal outlay of effort. It did not take much to construct one. The ideal was to locate a rock, or a spur, or a lonely hillock – a feature, in short, of the kind that only a few years previously would have been regarded as quite valueless – and plant on it some rudimentary wooden battlements. Even where the Loire valley was at its flattest, artificial mounds – or “mottes,” as they were termed – could be thrown up in a matter of months. Then, with
the site secured, the castle could be progressively upgraded. Fulk, as befitted a wealthy prince with a taste for the cutting edge, often ended up constructing battlements on an awesomely imposing scale. By the end of his reign, Anjou was shielded all along its frontiers by great donjons of solid stone. Castles and county alike: both had been built to last.
Yet if the new technology could be made to buttress a prince’s ambitions, so also might it menace them. In the millennial year itself, for instance, the citadel in Angers, Fulk’s capital, was seized and held against him. As a stab in the back, this revolt was especially shocking: for its captain was Fulk’s own wife, Elizabeth, who had been caught out in an affair. The cuckolded husband, never known for his good temper at the best of times, duly swept into town upon a great fire storm of rage. The citadel was stormed; much of Angers laid to waste; Elizabeth herself captured and burned at the stake. A brutal reprisal, to be sure – but bred, as was so often the case with Fulk, of measured calculation. Even had he wished to, he could not possibly have shown mercy to his wife. Treachery from those who most owed him their love imperilled everything. If rebellion could flare up in his household, in his marriage bed, then where else might its embers lie, waiting to burst into flames? In every castle there was a castellan, appointed to serve as its captain; and in every castellan a taste for violence and ambition. “No house is weak that has many friends.” So Geoffrey Greycloak, Fulk’s father, had advised his son. “Therefore I admonish you to hold dear those of your followers who have been faithful to you.”
17
A wise prescription, and one that Fulk adhered to throughout his life; yet never once did he presume to take those followers for granted. Humbly, in exchange for gifts of property, whether lands or strongholds or both, they were obliged to acknowledge their submission. Genuflecting before their lord, placing their clasped hands in his, humbly offering his foot or leg a kiss, they proclaimed themselves to all the world his “
vassi
”: his “vassals.” This, an ancient Gaulish word, had once referred only to the very lowest of the low, the
most desperate, the unfree; and even though, by the time of the Millennium, it had proved itself a term so upwardly mobile that it was held no shame even for a count or a duke to acknowledge himself the
vassus
of a king, the submission that it implied was no less solemn for that. Every vassal of Fulk knew of the penalties that would be exacted for any hint of treachery: the wasting of all he owned, and the desecration of his body. A lord prepared to burn his own wife, after all, could hardly have made the consequences of rebellion any clearer. No wonder, then, that Fulk’s castellans generally opted to keep their heads down. His vassals, by and large, proved themselves true to their oaths. Anjou cohered.
Nevertheless, even on a man as hard as the Black Count, the pressures of lordship were immense. Much more was at stake than his own fortunes. “Fearful of the day of judgement”:
18
so Fulk described himself. The same blood that had soaked the fields of Anjou, and served to fertilise his greatness, could not help but remind him too of the terrifying vanity of all mortal wishes. “For the fragility of the human race being what it is,” as he acknowledged bleakly, “the last moment may arrive at any time, suddenly and unforeseen.”
19
Always, amid the harrying of his adversaries, and the trampling of their ambitions, and the shattering of their swords, he dreaded ambush by the deadliest foe of all. Strategies to blunt the meat-hook of the Devil, and to fend off his assaults, were never far from Fulk’s mind. So it was, for instance, haunted by the thought of the Christian blood he had spilled at Conquereuil, that he founded “a church, a most beautiful one,”
20
in a field named
Belli Locus
, the Place of Battle. The count’s many enemies, scornful of what they saw as his crocodile tears, were naturally exultant when on the very day of its consecration a violent wind blew down its roof and a part of its wall: “for no one doubted that by his insolent presumption he had rendered his offering void.”
21
Perhaps – and yet to damn Fulk as a hypocrite was to misrepresent just how profoundly he feared for his soul, and for the troubled times in which he lived. “The end of the world being at hand, men are driven by a shorter life, and a more
atrocious cupidity consumes them”:
22
so had written a monk living in Poitiers, on the southern flank of Anjou, even as Fulk’s horsemen were raiding the fields beyond his monastery. Yet Fulk himself, had this judgement been brought to his attention, would not have disputed it. All his crimes and ravins, and all that he had won by them as well, he presumed to dedicate to a cause far nobler than his own.