Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

reduce it to ribbons. The great dynasties of the kingdom, long since denied the opportunity to pillage pagan enemies, had turned instead upon themselves. The resulting factionalism, which even the feuding warlords might on occasion find wearying, had begun to inspire, by the mid-tenth century, an inevitable revulsion. It was the Capetians, as befitted the most powerful Frankish dynasty of all, who had taken the lead. To a great lord such as Hugh Capet’s father, a man publicly acknowledged by Louis IV himself as ‘second only to the king throughout the kingdom’, the advantages accruing from a vast array of second cousins had appeared far from self-evident. Remorselessly, the definition of what constituted a Capetian had begun to narrow. The more distant the relations, the more ruthless the pruning. Those family members who did remain were reduced ever more to a state of inequality and dependence. By 956, when Hugh Capet succeeded his father as Duke of the Franks and inherited all the core holdings of the dynasty intact, even his younger brothers had found themselves effectively sidelined. By 996, when Hugh passed away in turn, no one was remotely surprised that Robert should have scooped up everything, lands as well as crown. As with the royal family of East Francia, so now with that of the Frankish Empire’s western half: the eldest son took all.

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’. 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 notwithstanding, 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 Orleans, 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