Note 186 — Chapter VII · Plantagenet Gothic Architecture[174]

Beginning with a Breton woodsman, five counts of Anjou ruled before Fulk III the Black (989-1040). He held Vendôme, Amboise, and Loches, where he founded Beaulieu Abbey, and he won Chinon, and Saumur, where he established St. Florent-les-Saumur. His grandfather, Fulk II the Good, a canon in St. Martin’s at Tours, and a poet, had said, “Rex illiteratus est asinus coronatus,” which Henry I of England was fond of repeating. The son of Fulk Nerra was Geoffrey Martel (d. 1060), who won Tours and Le Mans, but later lost the overlordship of the latter to William the Conqueror. He founded the Trinité at Vendôme. Geoffrey and Fulk, his two nephews, succeeded in turn, but Geoffrey was kept imprisoned in Chinon for almost thirty years by his unnatural brother Fulk Rechin, or the Quarreler, who had all the greed, subtlety, and turbulance of his line, without its genius for statesmanship. He is counted as the first historian of the Middle Ages. (See Hist. littér. de la France (Paris, 1750), vol. 9, p. 391.) Fulk Rechin’s son by the beautiful Bertrada de Montfort (who deserted him for the king of France) was Fulk V, who wedded the heiress of Maine. When later Fulk V won a second heiress in the East, he left Anjou and Maine to his son Geoffrey the Handsome, and reigned as king of Jerusalem (d. 1143). Geoffrey (d. 1151), nicknamed Plantagenet, married to the heiress of Normandy and England, always preferred Le Mans to Angers. His son became Henry II of England and a leader in Europe because of his territorial possessions on the Continent and his ability as a statesman.