Charter A Week 116: Small Power Politics?

Last time, we looked at Odo I of Blois-Chartres-Tours getting on the wrong side of Hugh Capet. This week, his troubles get worse. In 988, Count Geoffrey Grisegonelle of Anjou had died, and been replaced by his son Fulk Nerra. Fulk is, and I know this isn’t very scientific, a prick. Most earlier medieval figures are not people who you’d want to sit next to at a dinner party if you consider them by modern standards; but by the standards of his own time Fulk was a strange and unpleasant man. In the early years of Hugh Capet’s reign, both Fulk and Odo seem to have been competing for favour with the king, much as had been the case at Lothar’s court; but whereas Geoffrey Grisegonelle had been cordial (if perhaps increasingly cool) with both Theobald the Trickster and Odo, Fulk and Odo entered into open war. It has to be said that Fulk’s attack may not have been completely arbitrary. Our three main sources, Richer, Ralph Glaber, and the Chronicle of Nantes all say slightly different things, and all three link the conflict to events in Brittany. Richer says that Odo took ‘part of Brittany’ away from Fulk, and implies that it was the capture of Melun which allowed Fulk, as a royal partisan, to attack Odo. By contrast, Glaber says that Fulk and Conan the Crooked of Rennes broke out into open warfare without mentioning Odo. Finally, the Chronicle says that the warfare was originally between Conan and the comital family of Nantes, and that Fulk was drawn in by an appeal of Viscount Haimo of Nantes after Conan captured it; Odo is again unmentioned. This is presumably what Richer means: Conan actually was under Odo’s overlordship, but whether or not that weighed particularly heavy on him is, to say the least, disputable. In any case, Richer’s chronology is evidently borked, as he says that fighting leading up to the Battle of Conquereuil in 992 lasted for nearly two years, but also that it began in late 991. As such, my reconstruction is that Fulk was drawn into the conflict in Nantes by Haimo’s appeal, but, I assume, had already been looking for any excuse to go psychobilly bananas on the count of Tours’ land, and found it in the loose ties of overlordship between Odo and Conan.

Not that there’s ever a good time to be a civilian bystander in a war, especially in pre-modern societies where ravaging was the point, but these wars in the west were particularly unpleasant. Both Richer and Ralph Glaber emphasise the violence of the bloodshed of Fulk’s wars during this period, and apparently Abbot Robert of Saint-Florent de Saumur agreed, because this notice (written about a generation later) says that he took drastic steps to deal with the problem:

Halphen, Comté d’Anjou, P.J. no. 3 (c. 990) 

An account of the quarterons which are called Daiceae

In the times of our predecessors, when some abbot disposed of the abbey of Saint-Florent in Saumur, the aforesaid quarterons were conceded to a certain noble knight named Rainald Torench for the defence of estates of Saint-Florent, to wit, Saint-Georges-Châtelaison, Denezé, Distré, Ulmes and other lands of the same saint. 

The reason for the protection we spoke of is attested to be as follows: the abbacy of Saint-Florent and the castle of Saumur were under the jurisdiction of Count Odo. Count Fulk of Anjou, though, beset the same noble count with unremitting battles and roamed the lands under his jurisdiction with numerous armies; and thus in going back and forth greatly wore down the lands of Saint-Florent; and through claiming hospitality wickedly ravaged them.. 

The abbot, therefore, gave the said land to the aforesaid knight in order that he might be a protector of the land of Saint-Florent; and that whenever Count Fulk went out on an expedition, he should stand before the enemy on the land of Saint-Florent and by his authority and beseeching turn them away in order that they take no hospitality in them. 

The abbot’s oversight was ceded mostly in vain, for the protection he wanted to benefit him he did not receive, and he lost the land to the jurisdiction of the saint and himself.  

The said Rainald, who was father of Bishop Rainald of Angers, gave the land <of the quarteron of Daiceae> which we named above to Roger, lord of Loudun; and he gave it to Adalelm for <1 obol>* of false money from Thouars. 

His son Geoffrey the Red later spoke with Mainard, vicar of Doué, and persuaded him, for a price received thereafter, that he should ask for the said quarterons from Roger, son of the aforesaid Roger; and Geoffrey freely confessed that he wanted to hold them from Mainard rather than from Roger. 

Assenting to his words, Mainard asked for and received the said land from the aforesaid Roger, with the same Geoffrey’s assent.

This Geoffrey later sold this land to Aimeric Wandrillo, a certain knight, on the condition that he should in future pay the service from the same land to Mainard.

The witnesses to this were Warin of Chavais, his brother Frotgar, his other brother Stabilis and their mother.    

*The parts in hooked brackets are in superscript in the MS.

The MS in question, BNF NAL 1930, fol. 116r (link above). I have to confess to a gripe here, which is that in my very first visit to the BNF I spent ages making notes from this manuscript, which was and is for some reason unpublished; and now it’s online so I needn’t have bothered…

I now face a problem. Dealing with this charter isn’t really possible without engaging with the work of Professor Bernard Bachrach, and this is awkward because 1) Bernard Bachrach is completely wrong; and 2) he has recently, within a year of when I write this, become the late Professor Bernard Bachrach, and reconciling these two facts seems a bit like speaking ill of the dead. Still, given that Bachrach’s work, by dint of being both incredibly prolific and in English, has managed to be quite influential, it’s probably worth having a corrective up somewhere people can find it.

How does Bachrach interpret this charter? First, he argues that Odo I was actually at war with the Angevins much earlier, by summer 987 at the latest, as evidenced by Geoffrey Grisegonelle’s death besieging the castle of Odo’s vassal Odo Rufinus. Then, he argues that this charter represents a deal struck almost as soon as Fulk succeeded his father, based on a remark about ‘new wars’ in the Gesta consulum Andegavorum. He argues that Robert set about seeking the defection of Rainald Torench, viscount of Angers, from the Angevin cause and that this was, in theory, achieved by this deal. If Rainald had kept up his end, ‘this would materially weaken the count of Anjou by depriving him of the support of the Renaud family’ (‘Small-Power Politics’, p. 127). The whole family, indeed, was in on it: a tithe dispute between the monks of Saumur and the monks of Glanfeuil was decided in Saumur’s favour by Rainald Torench’s son Bishop Rainald II of Angers despite Fulk’s uncle Bishop Guy of Le Puy weighing in on Glanfeuil’s side, a clear sign of family treachery. However, through appealing to Hugh Capet, Fulk was able to have Rainald Torench declared treasurer of Saint-Martin in Tours (a man named Rainald appears in an act of 987 as treasurer, and there are only so many Rainalds).

So this is nonsense. First, the chronology is off. The identity of Odo Rufinus as a vassal of Odo I is a chain of logic so shaky I’ve actually mentioned in on this blog before as a prime example of particularly dubious reasoning. The Gesta consulum Andegavorum is a twelfth-century source which makes Fulk a son of his real-life brother Maurice, and the reference to ‘new wars’ is pretty straightforwardly a ‘one-thing-after-another’ kind of comment rather than something with real chronological precision even if we did have much reason to trust it. Without these sources, we don’t have any evidence to push conflict between Fulk and Odo any earlier than 990 (if we follow Richer’s ‘two years’) or even late 991 (if we follow him about the importance of Melun). This does at least mean we don’t have to deal with the ‘only so many Rainalds’ argument…

Second, and more importantly, this is a very bad misreading of this charter. Abbot Robert’s plan only works if Rainald Torench has a voice worth hearing amongst Fulk’s entourage. His job isn’t to fight Fulk off, it’s to intercede with the count to leave Saint-Florent’s land unscathed. If Rainald were being prised away to join some ‘Blésois Axis’, Robert’s plan would fail, because Rainald would be unable to play the part at the comital court which the abbot envisioned.

This points towards a wider point about the problems with how Bachrach writes Angevin history. What he produced was, essentially, Angevin history as Napoleonic War Mary Sue fanfiction. Throughout Bachrach’s work, the Angevins generally and Fulk Nerra in particular are treated as brilliant wargamers, cooly pursuing military and foreign policy grand plans to achieve world, or at least Loire Valley, domination; they are always at the centre of events; and they are often (despite their plans for world conquest) subject to the attacks of jealous rivals attempting to contain them in a balance-of-power environment. These rivals are, more specifically, rival Powers, and one is either on the Angevins’ side or on theirs. This charter, adduced as evidence for this view, actually works against it, though. Politics around 1000 was not Power Politics, Great or Small, it worked on webs of intercession and manifested as overlapping fields of social pressure. Robert of Saint-Florent understood this well, and even if his plan didn’t work out he wouldn’t have been foolish enough to formulate the quite different scheme which Bachrach imputes to him.