1066 - Andrew Bridgeford [79]
Throughout the Middle Ages the name of Charlemagne was held in awe and mystique. As King of the Franks from 768 to 814, Charlemagne had conquered Lombardy, subdued Saxony, annexed Bavaria, campaigned in Spain and Hungary, and he held the war banner of Christianity aloft against the pagans on many fronts. Allying himself with the papacy, he created a papal state in central Italy and in 800 was crowned by Pope Leo III as the Emperor of the West. At the height of his power Charlemagne ruled over a veritable superstate comprising practically all the lands of Western Christendom, with the exception only of the Asturias in Spain, southern Italy and the British Isles. After his death, however, this agglomeration quickly splintered into rival and warring territories. It is not surprising that, in retrospect, people looked upon the age of Charlemagne as a golden era, a time when Christendom was led by the true prototype of the Christian king and warrior. Stories of Charlemagne were told and retold in castles and halls and along the pilgrim routes; his achievements were celebrated, magnified and mythologised. Two and a half centuries after Charlemagne's death some of these stories took shape in the Chanson de Roland (the Song of Roland), the first great work of French literature. The origin and authorship of this poem remain mysterious but the story it tells, of the death of Charlemagne's nephew Roland fighting against the Muslims in the Pyrenees and of Charlemagne's subsequent revenge, was undoubtedly circulating in the France of the second half of the eleventh century. Charlemagne, as he appears in the Chanson de Roland, is a impossibly old figure in a flowing white beard, an indomitable and ceaseless warrior, a wise ruler with the aura of an Old Testament prophet, a man singularly favoured by God and palpably in touch with the divine. To have the blood of Charlemagne running through your veins was prestige indeed.
Prestige, however, was not enough; Charlemagne's dynasty had long ceased to reign over France. In the ninth century a series of weak and divided kings resulted in the kingship passing out of the Carolingian lineage. The heirs of Charlemagne regained the title sporadically from 893 but their reign finally came to an end in 987 with the death of the childless King Louis V. Hugh Capet, the duke of the Franks, supported by Archbishop Adalbero of Rheims, persuaded the magnates of France that the kingship was elective rather than hereditary and that Louis' uncle Charles of Lorraine was unfit to rule. Hugh was thus elected king. The subsequent attempts of Charles of Lorraine to wrest the crown from Hugh Capet came to naught. He was captured and imprisoned in 991 and died shortly afterwards. Although the Carolingian lineage continued to flourish in the noble families of Lorraine, Verman-dois, Blois, Flanders and Boulogne, never again was it to assume the royal title of France.
As Count of Boulogne and neighbouring Therouanne, Eustace was a vassal of the Capetian kings of his day. From 1054 he was also the Count of Lens, which he held from the Count of Flanders, himself a vassal of the French king. Such ties were limited in effect. Within his own territories Eustace, like William of Normandy, was virtually a sovereign prince, with power of life and death over his subjects and the ability to build castles, mint money and pursue his own independent policies. Though small by comparison to Normandy or Flanders, Boulogne was a prosperous county. Its geographical position, as the gateway between England and the continent, had long been a source of wealth. We