Source Translation: The Fragmentary History of Anjou

Fragmentum Historiae Andegavensis

I, Fulk, count of Anjou, who am son of Geoffrey of Château-Landon and Ermengard, daughter of Count Fulk [Nerra] of Anjou, and nephew of Geoffrey Martel, who was also the son of my grandfather Fulk and my mother’s brother, in the twenty-eighth year in which I held the consulate of Anjou and Tours and Nantes and Maine, wanted to set down in writing how my ancestors acquired and held their honour up to my time, and then about how I myself held the same honour, with the assistance of divine mercy.

Therefore, my ancestors, as my uncle Geoffrey Martel told me, were very valorous counts, and these are their names: first Ingelger, second Fulk the Red, his son; then Fulk, who is called ‘the Good’; afterwards, his son Geoffrey Grisegonelle. These four consuls held the honour of Anjou and snatched it from the hands of the pagans and defended it from Christian consuls. The first, Ingelger, had this honour from the king of France, not from the family of the impious Philip [I], but from the offspring of Charles the Bald, who was the son of Louis [the Pious], son of Charlemagne.

We cannot properly remember the virtues and acts of these four consuls, because they are so far away from Us that the places where their bodies lie are unknown to Us; but We can with those which are closer to Us, that is, those of my grandfather Fulk [Nerra], and of his father Geoffrey Grisegonelle, and of my uncle Geoffrey Martel.

Therefore, Geoffrey Grisegonelle, father of my grandfather Fulk, whose feats of prowess We cannot list, struck Loudun from the hand of the Count of Poitiers, and overcame him on the battlefield at Les Roches and pursued him all the way to Mirebeau. And he put the Bretons who came to Angers with a marauding army, the leaders of which were the sons of Conan, to flight. Later, he was with Duke Hugh [Capet] at the siege of Marçon, where the sickness from which he died took hold of him. His body was taken to Tours, and he was buried in the church of the blessed Martin.

His son Fulk succeeded him – that is, my grandfather – whose prowess was great and admirable. He, indeed, acquired the district of Maine and added it to the consulate of Anjou, and he built many castles on his land, which remained deserted and full of woods due to the savagery of the pagans. So, in the district of Touraine, he built Langeais, Chaumont, Montrésor, Sainte-Maure; in Poitou, Mirebeau, Moncontour, Faye, Montreuil, Passavant, Maulévrier; in Anjou, he built Baugé, Château-Gontier, Durtal, and many others it is a bother to name. He captured the castle of Saumur when Count Odo [II of Blois-Chartres-Tours] came to Angers with an army and set up camp in the salient between the city itself and the river Loire. Again, Fulk fought two very mighty field battles: one on the land of Conquereuil against Conan, the Breton consul, over the city of Nantes, which Conan wanted to take from him. The same Conan and a thousand of his knights perished in this battle. He fought the other battle, though, against the aforesaid very powerful count Odo on the river Cher, at Pontlevoy, in which battle the Count of Maine Heribert, who is called Wake-Dog, was with him, where, by God’s grace, he was the victor. He also built two abbeys: one in honour of Saint Nicholas next to the town of Angers, and the other at the castle of Loches, which is called Beaulieu, in honour of the Lord’s Sepulchre. He went to Jerusalem twice. On his second visit, he left this mortal coil, around the feast of Saint John, in the year of the Incarnation of the Lord one thousand and forty. His body was taken to the aforesaid abbey of Beaulieu and buried in the chapter there.

His son, my uncle, that is, Geoffrey Martel, succeeded him, whose prowess and prudence in worldly affairs was substantial and whose reputation was praiseworthy throughout the kingdom of France. He was a knight in his father’s lifetime, and he led his young soldiery against his neighbours, and he fought two battles: one at Moncontour [actually Mont-Couër] against the Poitevins, where he captured the count of Poitiers; and the other against the Manceaux, where he similarly captured their count, who is called Herbert Bacon. He fought a war against his father, in which many evils were done, for which he was later very penitent.

But after his father left this life, as was said above, on the return from Jerusalem, he possessed his father’s land and the city of Angers and began a war against Count Theobald of Blois, that is, the son of Count Odo, and by the will of King Henry [I], he received the gift of the city of Tours from the king, for which reason afterwards the conflict (guerra) between him and Count Theobald deepened, and they committed it to battle between the town of Tours and the castle of Amboise [at Nouy], in which Theobald was captured with around a thousand of his knights. And thus he received the city of Tours and the castles around: Chinon and Ile-Bouchard and Château-Renaud and Saint-Aignan. But another part of the district of Touraine fell to him because his father had possessed it.

After that, he fought a war against William [the Conqueror], count of the Normans, who later acquired the kingdom of the English and was a magnificent king; also, with the Gauls and with the Berrichons and with William [the Fat], consul of the Poitevins, and with Viscount Aimeric [IV] of Thouars, and with Hoël [II], count of Nantes, and with the counts of the Bretons who held the city of Rennes, and with Hugh, consul of Maine, who quit his fidelity. Because of all these battles, and because of the valiant spirit which he displayed there, he was worthily named ‘Martel [the Hammer]’, as one who smashed his enemies to bits.

In the last year of his life, he knighted me, his nephew, in the city of Angers, on the feast of Pentecost, in the year of the Incarnation of the Lord one thousand and sixty, and he committed to me the district of Saintois with the city of Saintes because of a certain conflict which he had with Peter of Didonne. I was seventeen years old when he made me a knight. After that, in the same year, King Henry died on the feast of the birth of Saint John [actually 4^th August] and my uncle Geoffrey reached a good end on the third day after the feast of the blessed Martin [14^th November]. The night before he died, he laid down all care for knighthood and worldly affairs, and was made a monk in the monastery of Saint-Nicolas, which his father and he had build with great devotion and supplied from their goods.

And thus he left his honour, which he had held securely and richly in great tranquillity and defended from foreign peoples, to be troubled with a certain tribulation, that is, by the arising of dissension over the same honour between me and my brother. When we had prolonged this tribulation , often conflicting and having truces sometimes, and I had also, by the command of Pope Alexander, freed my brother from the chains in which I held him, the same brother attacked me again, besieging one of my castles which is called Brissac. I rode out against him there with those magnates whom the clemency of God permitted me, and I fought with him on the battlefield, and there, by God’s grace, I overcame him, and he was captured and returned to me, and a thousand of his people with him. So then I got the city of Angers and Tours and the castle of Loches and Loudun, which are the chief places in the honour of the consuls of Anjou.

Therefore, I held that honour for twenty-eight years until the time I decided to write this document. If you want to hear what I did during those twenty-eight years, and in the other eight which preceded them, follow what I write and you will know what was done. But before I retell this, I want to recall certain signs and prodigies which came to pass in the last year of the aforesaid time, pertaining not only to our people but to the whole kingdom of Gaul, as affairs made manifest afterwards. At that time, indeed, stars fell from heaven to earth like hail. Many who saw them marvelled, and many were fearstruck. Following this sign came a great plague throughout the kingdom of France, and a very hard time where food was lacking. From this, in our city of Angers a hundred of our leading men died, and more than two thousand of the lesser citizens.

At the end of that year, as Lent was drawing near, the Roman pope Urban came to Angers and admonished the people that they should go to Jerusalem to fight the pagan people who occupied that city and the entire land of the Christians up to Constantinople. Then, in Lent, the church of Saint-Nicolas was dedicated by the pope, and my uncle Geoffrey’s body was moved to the chapter of the same church. The same apostolic man established and commanded by an edict that a public feast should be celebrated each year at Saint-Nicolas on the same date he had carried out the dedicated, and a seventh part of penances should be remitted for suitable people at that celebrations. Leaving there, he came to Le Mans and then to Tours; there, decrees were given to a venerable council in the middle of Lent, and afterwards he was crowned and led in solemn procession from the church of Saint-Maurice to the church of the blessed Martin. There, he gave me a golden flower which he bore in his hand, which I also, for memory and love of him, established would be ever defended by me and my successor, hosanna. After his departure, on the next Palm Sunday, the church of the blessed Martin burned down. But the pope went to Saintes and celebrated Easter there…

This post fulfils a promise. When I first put up the source translation page back in June, I ran a poll promising to translate something extra ‘this week’. ‘This week’ turned into ‘within the next twelve months’, but I have nonetheless done it! What we have here is a history which is purportedly, and per recent work likely actually, the memoirs of Count Fulk IV of Anjou from the latter part of the eleventh century. It is fragmentary because after the bit I’ve given you it breaks off into an account of the First Crusade and then breaks off entirely.

What interests me about this is the sense of identity Fulk has. People tend to see the count of Anjou as a ‘territorial prince’, but Fulk’s sense of Angevin identity isn’t attached to territory, because he’s very explicit about the shifting territorial fortunes of his family: he holds, as he saws, an honor comprising Anjou and Touraine and Nantes and Maine, but not defined by it. The continuity of the honor is separate from its territorial composition. It is, however, still something coherent. Note how Fulk talks about ‘foreign peoples’, meaning his neighbours from other French regions.

Now, Fulk is trying to do several things here. Not the least of them, as you may be able to tell, is to justify and to an extent cover up the particulars of his usurpation of his brother Geoffrey, whom he deposed and imprisoned. (He avoids, for instance, mentioning that Pope Alexander didn’t just command him to release Geoffrey, but also excommunicated him.) So at least in part Fulk is trying to write a history of glorious ancestors who ruled a coherent entity – they are great and I am like them – and so his portrayal of that entity as coherent fits his purposes. On the other hand, this was a longer process as well – Fulk was both exploiting and developing an ‘Angevin’ identity.