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

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 firestorm 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.’ 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’: 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.’ 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’, 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’. 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’: 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