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From the Ashes of History
 From the Ashes of History
Collective Trauma and the Making of International
Politics
ADAM B. LERNER
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and
certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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© Oxford University Press 2022
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You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930623
ISBN 978–0–19–762359–6 (pbk.)
ISBN 978–0–19–762358–9 (hbk.)
ISBN 978–0–19–762361–9 (epub.)
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197623589.001.0001
 Contents

Acknowledgments

PART I. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

1. Collective Trauma and the Making of International Politics
2. Theorizing Collective Trauma
3. Collective Trauma and Identity: A Necessary Liaison

PART II. THREE EMPIRICAL CASES

4. Colonialism as Collective Trauma: Economic Nationalism and
Autarkic State-Building in India
5. Victimhood Nationalism in Israel: The Eichmann Trial’s Role in
Israeli Foreign Policy Discourse
6. Blurring the Boundaries of War: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
and the Collectivization of US Combat Trauma
7. Conclusion

References
Index
 Acknowledgments

This book represents the culmination of a multiyear journey across

continents and scholarly disciplines. I am thankful to have had
numerous guides and fellow travelers.
The research began in 2015 at the University of Cambridge.
During my MPhil and PhD research (2015–2019), I was lucky to
benefit from the mentorship of three fantastic scholars: Shailaja
Fennell, Duncan Bell, and Yale Ferguson. Their kindness, support,
and insight were paramount in formulating the ideas in this book,
and I am deeply grateful to each of them. I was also lucky at
Cambridge to meet three close friends working on related subjects:
Sean Fleming, Jaakko Heiskanen, and Lucas de Oliveira Paes. All of
them have become intellectual sparring partners and generously
provided feedback on multiple chapters. Additionally, I would like to
extend my thanks to Shama Ams, Anjali Bhardwaj-Datta, Joya
Chatterji, Lorena Gazzotti, Avneet Kaur, David Lowe, Giovanni
Mantilla, Jason Sharman, Ayse Zarakol, and Maja Spanu—all of
whom took part in this book’s ideation and refinement.
While doing archival research in India in 2018, I benefited from
the support of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s
India branch in Delhi, which provided research assistance during my
tenure as a visiting scholar. I further benefited from the friendship
and support of Satbir Bedi, Shashwat Silas, Sukrit Silas, and Neil
Noronha. I would also like to extend my thanks to Vinod Jose and
Hartosh Singh Bal, two mentors from my prior career as a journalist
who helped me navigate Delhi’s archives, libraries, and politics.
Once I began my appointment at Royal Holloway, University of
London, in 2019, this book benefited immensely from the support of
wonderful colleagues. In particular, I want to single out Laura
Sjoberg, who arrived at Royal Holloway after me but quickly became
an ideal mentor and confidant. She read book chapters, helped me
navigate revision and submission, and even provided vital good
humor and encouragement during the worst periods of lockdown. I
am similarly indebted to Ben O’Loughlin and Michelle Bentley—
friends and mentors who provided advice, support, and feedback. I
would also like to thank Antara Datta, Chris Hanretty, Sarah Childs,
Thomas Stubbs, Daniela Lai, Dishil Shrimankar, and Oliver Heath for
reading chapters of the manuscript and providing advice during its
revision. For engaging with my work remotely and offering
thoughtful feedback and guidance, I would like to thank Brent
Steele, Medha Kudaisya, Maria Mälksoo, Lene Hansen, Karin Fierke,
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, and Dovile Budryte. Paul Beaumont,
additionally, provided enormous help and good humor during the
final stages of revision.
During the publication process, I was lucky to receive the
guidance and wisdom of Oxford University Press’s senior editor
Angela Chnapko—a true champion of scholarly research. A thanks
are also due to the three anonymous reviewers whose detailed
comments helped improve the manuscript and see it across the
finish line. Portions of chapters 5 and 6 were previously published in
the European Journal of International Relations and Perspectives on
Politics, respectively, and I am grateful to both journals for granting
permission to adapt this work.
Finally, I am deeply indebted to my friends and family, scattered
across the globe, who have provided their support, encouragement,
and love throughout this process. In particular, I want to thank my
mom (Lisa Horowitz), my dad (Bruce Lerner), and my sister (Kira
Lerner), whose love and kindness kept me sane during a long and
difficult research process. Partway through this journey, I was lucky
to meet my partner, Allicen Dichiara, and adopt our dog, Moose—
they have since become my family. Once they entered the picture, I
couldn’t have imagined writing this book without them.
 PART I
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
 1
Collective Trauma and the Making of
International Politics

Introduction
The varied origin stories that international relations (IR) scholars
have proposed for their discipline all share one thing in common.
Whether they refer back to the Peace of Westphalia following the
Thirty Years’ War, the first “great debate” following World War I, or
even Thucydides’s early classical realist account of the
Peloponnesian War, they all envision the international political arena
as forged in the wake of mass violence. Even alternative, critical
accounts that locate IR’s roots in long-standing imperial hierarchies,
the international slave trade, or the twentieth century’s wave of
decolonization similarly implicate the structural violence of empire
and racism, as well as the often violent expulsion of foreign rulers.1
These mythologized origins allude to the pervasiveness of mass
violence in IR, with a role that extends well beyond inquiries into the
discipline’s roots. Many of the institutions that scholars of
international politics study—including the borders that define states,
the norms that delineate appropriate behavior, the organizations that
manage interstate relations, and even the ideational lines between
“us” and “them”—similarly emerged due to tremendous bloodshed
and oppression. Just as medicine tends to pay disproportionate
attention to diseases of the body, IR tends to focus on diseases of
world politics.
Yet despite the disproportionate attention mass violence receives,
IR scholarship has a problematic tendency to accept its
consequences at face value. Typically, scholars follow an implicit
“event” model of mass violence, based on linear, sequential timing2
and mechanistic notions of cause and effect. This model understands
violent episodes as having defined durations, beginning with
identifiable dawns and culminating in conclusive dusks. According to
such thinking, once a cataclysm finishes, its destructive
consequences become readily apparent and, potentially, quantifiable.
Interest is piqued as media report damages, often in the form of
casualty counts, eyewitness testimonies, or visuals of destroyed
property. Shortly after, experts estimate the costs of material
damages, as well as a timeline and budget for repairs. Politicians—
including international statesmen and stateswomen—craft plans for
reconstruction and rehabilitation. Citizens on the ground soldier on,
finding ways to overcome difficulties and rebuild their lives. Over
time, as infrastructure is repaired and victims’ physical wounds heal,
politicians move on to new, more pressing issues. Mass violence thus
fades from attention and is relegated to the past. Time stubbornly
marches on.
Though perhaps intuitively appealing, pivotal global trends
continually attest to the inadequacy of this simplified linear event
model of mass violence. The year 2020 alone (in which the bulk of
this manuscript was written), with its compounding global tragedies,
featured numerous shocks and shifts explicable only with reference
to festering wounds of history that defy the event model’s
assumptions. The Covid-19 pandemic, for example, certainly caused
new waves of death and destruction, but it also preyed on lingering
structural injustices in social and political systems, stemming from
legacies of mass violence that hibernate politically during periods of
prosperity.3 State-led responses to the pandemic, including public
finger-pointing and immigration restrictions, similarly reflected deep-
rooted global hierarchies and rivalries, developed due to mass
violence and subsequent, ongoing suspicion and tension.4 In the
midst of shutdowns and simmering frustration, the May 2020 death
of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers ignited
outrage and protests across the globe. This transnational movement
focused not only on the specific heartbreak of Floyd’s death but also
on larger questions of how the legacy of past violent oppression
such as slavery, imperialism, and Jim Crow lives on in present-day
institutions and practices.5 Meanwhile, nationalist politics in Israel,
Hungary, India, China, the United States, and elsewhere have
capitalized on pandemic-related frustrations to promote narratives of
past suffering and future glory. In the summer of 2020, the German
government even shut down one quarter of its most elite special
forces unit after discovering far-right members parroting Nazi-era
conspiracy theories about internal enemies backstabbing the nation.6
As the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen titled his
book on Vietnam’s memory of war, “Nothing Ever Dies.”7 But if that’s
the case, why do some memories lie dormant for generations only to
arise anew?
In this book, I advocate a new approach to understanding how
histories of mass violence reverberate in the present that
complicates the event model and its logics. This approach recognizes
how the legacy of mass violence can persist over time, radiating out
through networks and power structures, reshaping international
political actors and their logics of action. To fully account for these
enduring impacts, I argue for understanding the sociopolitical
processing of mass violence via the lens of collective trauma.
Drawing on the interdisciplinary insights of trauma studies
scholarship, I develop this lens to understand not only how
individuals respond to mass violence but also how the aftermath of
mass violence becomes politically embedded over time, liable not
only to shape dominant modes of thinking but also to resurge in
importance during pivotal moments and motivate action. While
rationalist approaches may envision idealized actors disregarding the
“sunk costs” of past suffering and focusing solely on future risks and
choices, I argue that collective trauma can shape how actors
interpret this future, its logics, and its lingering injustices. In the
aftermath of mass violence, collective trauma can constitute
understandings of self and other that frame notions of reconciliation,
rehabilitation, and recovery. Only by developing a theoretical lens
attuned to collective trauma’s varied, context-specific permutations
can the IR discipline fully grasp the world that mass violence has
helped create.
Take as a concrete example the 1945 charter of the United
Nations (UN), the preeminent international organization of the
twentieth century. Mainstream rationalist IR theory has traditionally
understood the organization either via the realist paradigm’s logic, as
a forum for self-interested great powers to exert influence, or via the
liberal paradigm’s logic, as a cooperative institution that helps states
negotiate mutually advantageous outcomes. Yet in addition to these
explanations, the UN also has deep roots in collective trauma,
articulated explicitly in its founding documents. The UN’s first
mission, the charter states, is “to save succeeding generations from
the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold
sorrow to mankind.”8 Though the goal of preventing war’s future
costs can certainly be understood rationally, divorced from history,
this statement is explicitly retrospective—informing the institution’s
understanding of this “scourge” were the failures of both previous
generations of leaders and, implicitly, its institutional predecessor,
the League of Nations. In the new body’s first session, alongside
administrative matters and pressing international issues such as the
refugees stranded across the globe, the General Assembly passed a
resolution condemning the crime of genocide, inspired, no doubt, by
the mass violence perpetrated by Nazi Germany. Rather than
employing stale bureaucratic language, the text resonated deeply
with prevailing psychoanalytic conceptions of trauma from the
period, stating that genocide “shocks the conscience of mankind”
and is “contrary to moral law and to the spirit and aims of the United
Nations.”9
The tension inherent in processing a diverse array of others’ pain,
including that of millions who perished in prior conflicts and
genocides, and articulating it as a motivation for collective action
alludes to the complexity inherent in collective trauma as an
international political phenomenon. These diplomats’ actions, I
argue, cannot be understood solely as a rationalized effort to
prevent the costly recurrence of violence. Such an explanation lacks
specificity for why they framed problems in this historically informed
way. A complete explanation must also account for the context of
the UN’s founding, informed by a recent history of mass violence on
a horrific scale. It must recognize that beyond strategic material
goals, the founders were also motivated by a desire to bear witness
to the collective trauma that had resulted from previous diplomatic
failures. Despite the difficulties in articulating the legacy of mass
violence, collective trauma informed not only how they understood
the potential consequences of global conflict but also how they
envisioned potential future solutions.
Before proceeding, it’s worth acknowledging that the example of
the UN is a deliberately provocative one. Indeed, the term “collective
trauma,” which I employ throughout the book, can seem misplaced
when used to describe the stodgy work of elite diplomats, gathered
in cosmopolitan Western cities, passing resolutions that impact most
people’s lived experience only indirectly. Most of those who
negotiated the UN’s charter had not fought on the battlefields of
World War II, nor had they stared down the Nazi gas chambers.
Though many worked on international political issues during the war
effort, they often learned of mass violence solely through
government and media reports, witness testimony, or even simply
public discourse. This distance is suggestive of the broader
observation that often those elite actors best equipped to avoid the
most acute violence of international politics are also those who both
often order it and exert outsize control in shaping domestic and
international responses. In presenting work on collective trauma at
conferences and workshops, I’ve similarly encountered resistance to
extending the term “trauma” to collectives, beyond specific
psychiatric diagnostic criteria applied in clinical settings. Doing so,
some contend, may dilute the necessary attention paid to the very
real pain of those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD). This disorder, which I discuss at length throughout the
book, is especially prevalent among survivors of combat, wartime
sexual violence, and natural disasters—all central concerns for IR
scholarship. Victims of these forms of violence are often poorly
represented in international politics, and their experiences rightly
deserve scholarly attention. Some may fear that broadening the
term “trauma” to collectives undermines this book’s primary goal of
orienting scholarly attention to unseen aspects of the aftermath of
mass violence.
Yet despite the worthiness of focusing attention on individuals’
struggles with psychic trauma, this medicalized interpretation is a
limited one, representing only a single vantage point on the larger
issues implicated in mass violence’s multivalent social, psychological,
and political processing. Though elites often avoid direct experiences
of mass violence, they are deeply implicated in the international
political systems that both inflict this violence and are subsequently
tasked with interpreting and responding to it. Individuals may be the
primary nodes for experiencing mass violence, but its effects seep
out, shaping political cultures and the institutions that govern them.
Similarly, mass violence experienced and interpreted by larger
communities and their institutions can reverberate back on
individuals and frame their thinking, making trauma particularly
difficult to isolate in individuals’ psyches.10 Indeed, this
macropolitical regulation of individual interpretations is often poorly
captured by the norms of medical diagnoses.
For this reason, I employ throughout this book the alternative
term “collective trauma,” reflecting an approach in tune with what I
see as a more comprehensive reading of the term’s long-term,
multivalent evolution into the twenty-first century. Originally
stemming from the Greek for “wound,” the concept of “trauma” has
developed substantially over time, from the physical to the
neurological and later the psychological and social. Indeed, the
contemporary PTSD diagnosis itself reflects a compromise forged in
the late 1970s to meet specific demands within American
psychiatry.11 Unsurprisingly, it exhibits numerous shortcomings and
biases that have led to ample critical re-evaluations.12 Scholars have
argued that PTSD is both over-applied and under-theorized13 and
that it neglects mass violence’s multifaceted impacts beyond isolated
individuals’ brains. By the final decades of the twentieth century,
scholars in the humanities and social theory thus began
conceptualizing trauma in new ways to better capture those
interpretive qualities often overlooked by the medical
establishment.14 Traumatic shocks impact how individuals grapple
with their own experiences not only psychologically but also
spiritually, socially, and politically. Trauma thus plays a complex role
in shaping individuals’ representations of such experiences, as well
as interpretations by others (including political leaders) who may not
have experienced violence firsthand. Literary theorist Cathy Caruth,
a leading voice in the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies, has
thus defined trauma more broadly as a delayed response to an
“overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events.” This
delay, she posits, problematizes “referential” models of history based
on linear timing—including, I would argue, the “event” model that
dominates IR—raising questions of how to represent violence not yet
fully processed by its victims or their communities.15 As chapter 2,
which theorizes collective trauma more fully, will outline, it is
precisely here, in the tension inherent in individuals narrating
traumatic experiences, that I build my conceptualization of collective
trauma as the multilevel crisis in representation inherent in the
sociopolitical processing of mass violence. As large numbers of
individuals undergo related psychic shocks and bear witness to their
experiences of mass violence, the crisis in representation facing
them reverberates outward, shaping politics at multiple levels of
aggregation. Eventually, narratives of mass violence’s legacy can
collectivize trauma, making it relevant to groups and the institutions
that represent them. Despite the tension inherent in transforming
individuals’ experiences into collective trauma narratives, I argue
that they are a vital force both in the constitution of political actors
and in framing their logics of action.
Framed in this general way, the role of collective trauma in
international politics may seem obvious and uncontroversial. But
recognizing the complexities inherent in the legacy of mass violence
is hardly the norm in IR scholarship. By atomizing mass violence into
discrete episodes concluded in linear time, much of IR sanitizes
collective trauma from analysis, focusing instead on the concrete
changes that violent “events” produce in the balance of power,
international political economy, or security calculations. This remains
the case even in scholarship investigating the longer-term impacts of
mass violence—such work tends to focus less on sociopolitical
imaginaries and more on tangible, quantifiable changes in
outcomes.16 The rationalist approaches that dominate IR’s
mainstream often take for granted status quo arrangements forged
in fire, assuming self-interested actors will remain equally rational
wealth- and security-driven egoists in the wake of devastation. The
classic neorealist analogy of the international system as a billiards
table with states as the balls omits the complex evolution of subjects
following collision, accounting only for the ricocheting of similar,
preexisting, structurally sound objects. More recent neopositivist
iterations of this mainstream have, in many ways, intensified this
sanitization by distilling the complexities of mass violence’s legacy
into impersonal statistics that fail to capture the subtleties of psychic
experience or its social and political interpretation. Collective trauma,
I will demonstrate, poses a dilemma for mainstream positivist
scholarship, which cannot easily accommodate such a nuanced,
latent, subjective, historically contingent, and non-systematic
phenomenon.17
Outside the disciplinary mainstream, in recent decades, several
noteworthy critical contributions have begun incorporating the
concept of trauma into IR’s theoretical toolkit and exploring its
potential entanglements with concepts such as memory, ontological
security, and transitional justice.18 From this literature, two
exemplary monographs stand out. First, Jenny Edkins’s 2003 Trauma
and the Memory of Politics draws on a psychoanalytic understanding
of trauma to examine how states can co-opt the aftermath of
violence to reassert their power—a form of what she terms “political
abuse.” Through careful interpretive analysis, Edkins elucidates how
even modern liberal democratic states’ legitimacy often depends on
erasure of trauma—for example, medicalizing soldiers’ traumatic
responses to war in order to return them to active duty or
pathologize their natural aversion to the gruesome reality of state
power. Yet despite its clear insight, the book’s argument rests on a
problematic assumption that the “dominant views” of the state will
necessarily suppress or instrumentalize trauma. It thus raises
questions about the degree to which, in certain circumstances,
trauma can meaningfully challenge state identities and inform policy
agendas.19
Second and more recently, Emma Hutchison’s Affective
Communities has theorized how in the wake of traumatic events,
shared emotions can link together local, national, and even
transnational “affective communities.” Hutchison’s work pays keen
attention to the representation of trauma. Through a diverse array of
cases, Hutchison demonstrates how linguistic and visual
representations—primarily spread through mass media or
government propaganda—create shared meanings that consolidate
bonds in national and transnational space.20 However, despite her
success in linking trauma to macroscale identities, her work leaves
open questions about how trauma interacts with power—how
trauma can not only foster transnational solidarities but also infuse
and constitute political institutions to reshape policy debates.
Further, as I have argued previously, Hutchison’s lack of engagement
with the economic dimensions of trauma can lead to problematically
narrow analysis of subalterns’ experiences of mass violence.21
In this book, I build on these recent contributions to theorize
collective trauma’s foundational role in the international system—an
echo of the mass violence that permeates world politics. Trauma
does not simply foster temporary shocks or emotional outpourings
for preexisting actors or groups. Rather, this book’s central argument
is that collective trauma can shape the enduring understandings of
self and other that delineate the international arena’s primary actors,
as well as the logics informing these actors’ interactions. For this
reason, I conceptualize collective trauma as a multilevel crisis in
representation—the result of initial violent disjunctures reverberating
through complex political systems. This unique approach has
multiple advantages. First and foremost, it helps expand analysis
beyond the aftermath of acute violent events to longer-term
structural violence, oppression, and injustice embedded in the
international system. This initial expansion serves a second, related
goal of extending the study of trauma beyond the Western contexts
in which trauma studies has traditionally been developed and taught
to better account for the legacy of diverse forms of suffering,
depredation, and oppression that have disproportionately impacted
those in the non-West. Third, it allows scholarship to combat the
problematic relativism of certain existing approaches, differentiating
the traumas of actors with the resources to “work through”
(materially, psychically, and socially) from actors without those
resources.22 Taken together, these additions prove vital to helping
the IR discipline more fully grapple with the traumatic legacy of
varied forms of structural mass violence—including colonialism,
genocide, and ethnic cleansing—that have helped maintain the
international system’s enduring hierarchies.
In many ways, this theoretical goal of crafting a flexible lens
suitable to investigating collective trauma’s permutations across time
and space might seem lofty. By attuning IR scholarship to the
interdisciplinary insight of trauma studies, I seek not only to enrich
the discipline’s understanding of how histories of violence
reverberate into the present but also, as later chapters will
demonstrate more clearly, to destabilize some of IR’s most taken-for-
granted concepts. In this sense, this book is fundamentally a work of
international political theory in the mold of what Ian Shapiro calls
“problematizing redescription.”23 It flips common understandings of
violence’s aftermath in IR on their head, providing a new approach
to their interpretation. Because collective trauma is implicated in the
formation of so many institutions vital to international politics, I
argue that it must be understood as an ontological condition of
international life.
Yet in other regards, my ambitions in this book are more modest.
I do not seek to identify a falsely parsimonious explanation of
collective trauma as an isolatable causal mechanism with specific,
consistent effects, nor do I predict how it will develop into the
future. Collective trauma’s impacts are deeply contextual,
comprehensible solely in relation to the political dynamics that shape
trauma’s narration and interpretation. Further, given my goal of
applying trauma studies insight outside the context of its original
development, I exercise caution in my empirical analysis so that my
lens is not overly prescriptive. While I demonstrate how scholars can
draw on my theoretical framework as an ideal-typical heuristic to
trace collective trauma’s impacts over time, analysis must also
remain sensitive to the unique conditions from which collective
trauma emerges and in which it is interpreted, as well as the
alternative forces and identities with which it interacts. For this
reason, in this book’s second, empirical part, I deploy this lens in
three detailed historical investigations into the legacy of colonialism
in Indian state-building and development planning, Israel’s long-term
reckoning with the genocide of European Jewry, and the specific
discursive impact of PTSD in twenty-first-century American foreign
policy imaginaries. These three cases demonstrate not only the
varied roles collective trauma can play across time and space but
also how scholarship can employ this book’s lens without forcing
complex historical developments into a Procrustean bed of theory.
Taken together, they reflect back on my theorization’s strengths and
limitations, alluding to its transportability across time and space. In
so doing, they reaffirm my “problematizing redescription” of mass
violence’s legacy as collective trauma, encouraging further potential
reflection on collective trauma’s wide impacts, as well as what
precisely falls under the disciplinary gaze of IR.
The interdisciplinary study of trauma has already reshaped
multiple other disciplines in recent decades and deserves far deeper
engagement in IR, especially considering the discipline’s long-
standing interests in war, colonialism, genocide, and other forms of
politically motivated mass violence. As Caruth writes, consideration
of trauma’s disruption of linear timing and problematization of
memory involves a rethinking of how scholarship engages in
historical analysis. She even suggests that such a vision necessitates
a paradigmatic shift—that one can view “history [as] precisely the
way we are implicated in each other’s traumas.”24 Though perhaps,
when applied to IR, such a shift will need to be more qualified, I
provocatively ask if the same thinking might extend to the
international system. To what extent do international politics reflect
how we are implicated in one another’s collective traumas?

The Logic of the Argument: Methodology and

Methods
I divide this book into two parts, the first primarily theoretical and
the second primarily empirical. Though they can certainly be read
independently, read together they demonstrate both the value added
to empirical analysis by the first part’s lens and the broader utility of
a collective trauma-based framework for IR scholarship. The first
part builds on this chapter’s introduction, theorizing collective trauma
as an emergent phenomenon and the foundational role it can play in
the identity discourses that constitute the subjects, objects, and
logics of international political action.25 These theoretical chapters
serve as the “problematizing redescription” that Shapiro highlights as
a primary goal of political theory. Together, they offer a
“recharacterization that speaks to the inadequacies in the prior
account,” and in turn, this vision serves as a potent lens for analysis,
uncovering new aspects of these cases neglected in prevailing IR
and historical scholarship.26 Before proceeding, however, it’s worth
briefly outlining the methodological foundations of this theoretical
lens, which I understand in the mold of Weberian ideal-typification.
This vision of theory diverges from that of much mainstream social
science. I do not aspire to offer nomothetic social laws or even a
description of collective trauma as a systematic, objective
phenomenon with consistent effects across time and space. Rather, I
demonstrate how theorizing collective trauma in a more self-
reflexive, historically informed manner can serve both as a powerful
heuristic for empirical analysis and as a potent critique of
mainstream IR models of the international system.
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of Archbishop Adaland of Tours and his brother Raino, who,
however, was bishop of Angers, not of Orléans as the treatise says.
The passages in the Tours chronicle where Ingelger is described as
count of Anjou are all derived from this source, and therefore prove
nothing, except the writer’s ignorance about counts and bishops
alike.
The mention of Archbishop Adaland brings us to another subject—
Ingelger’s marriage. Ralf de Diceto (Stubbs, vol. i. p. 139) says that
he married Ælendis, niece of Archbishop Adaland and of Raino,
bishop of Angers, and that these two prelates gave to the young
couple their own hereditary estates at Amboise, in Touraine and in
the Orléanais. The Gesta Consulum (Marchegay, Comtes, p. 45) say
the same, but afterwards make Raino bishop of Orléans. This story
seems to be a bit of truth which has found its way into a mass of
fiction; at any rate it is neither impossible nor improbable. The author
of the De Reversione is quite right in saying that Archbishop Adaland
died shortly after the return of the relics; his statement, and those of
the Tours Chronicle, that Adaland was consecrated in 870 and died
in 887, are borne out by the same charters which enable us to track
the career of Fulk the Red. As to Raino—there was a Raino ordained
bishop of Angers in 881 (Chron. Vindoc. ad ann. in Marchegay,
Eglises d’Anjou, p. 160). The version which makes Orléans his see
is derived from the false Cluny treatise.
Fulk the Red was witnessing charters in 886 and died in 941 or
942. He must have been born somewhere between 865 and 870; as
the traditional writers say he died “senex et plenus dierum, in bonâ
senectute,” it may have been nearer the earlier date. There is thus
no chronological reason why these two prelates should not have
been his mother’s uncles; and as the house of Anjou certainly
acquired Amboise somehow, it may just as well have been in this
way as in any other.
 Note B.
THE PALACE OF THE COUNTS AT ANGERS.

Not only ordinary English tourists, but English historical scholars

have been led astray in the topography of early Angers by an
obstinate local tradition which long persisted in asserting that the
counts and the bishops of Angers had at some time or other made
an exchange of dwellings; that the old ruined hall within the castle
enclosure was a piece of Roman work, and had served, before this
exchange, as the synodal hall of the bishops. The date adopted for
this exchange, when I visited Angers in 1877 (I have no knowledge
of the place since that time) was “the ninth century”; some years
before it was the twelfth or thirteenth century, and the synodal hall of
the present bishop’s palace, with its undercroft, was shown and
accepted as the home of all the Angevin counts down to Geoffrey
Plantagenet at least. The whole history of the two palaces—that of
the counts and that of the bishops—has, however, been cleared up
by two local archæologists, M. de Beauregard (“Le Palais épiscopal
et l’Eglise cathédrale d’Angers,” in Revue de l’Anjou et de Maine-et-
Loire, 1855, vol. i. pp. 246–256), and M. d’Espinay, president of the
Archæological Commission of Maine-et-Loire (“Le Palais des
Comtes d’Anjou,” Revue historique de l’Anjou, 1872, vol. viii. pp.
153–170; “L’Evêché d’Angers,” ib. pp. 185–201). The foundation and
result of their arguments may be briefly summed up. The first bit of
evidence on the subject is a charter (printed by M. de Beauregard,
Revue de l’Anjou et de Maine-et-Loire, as above, vol. i. pp. 248, 249;
also in Gallia Christiana, vol. xiv. instr. cols. 145, 146) of Charles the
Bald, dated July 2, 851, and ratifying an exchange of lands between
“Dodo venerabilis Andegavorum Episcopus et Odo illustris comes.”
The exchange is thus described:—“Dedit itaque præfatus Dodo
episcopus antedicto Odoni comiti, ex rebus matris ecclesiæ S.
Mauricii, æquis mensuris funibusque determinatam paginam terræ
juxta murum civitatis Andegavensis, in quâ opportunitas jam dicti
comitis mansuræ sedis suorumque successorum esse cognoscitur.
Et, e contra, in compensatione hujus rei, dedit idem Odo comes ex
comitatu suo terram S. Mauricio æquis mensuris similiter funibus
determinatam prænominato Dodoni episcopo successoribusque suis
habendam in quâ predecessorum suorum comitum sedes fuisse
memoratur.” As M. de Beauregard points out, the traditionary version
—whether placing the exchange in the ninth century or in the twelfth
—is based on a misunderstanding of this charter. The charter says
not a word of the bishop giving up his own actual abode to the count;
it says he gave a plot of ground near the city wall, and suitable for
the count to build himself a house upon. Moreover the words “sedes
fuisse memoratur” seem to imply that what the count gave was not
his own present dwelling either, but only that which had been
occupied by his predecessors. There can be little doubt that the
Merovingian counts dwelt on the site of the Roman citadel of
Juliomagus; and this was unquestionably where the bishop’s palace
now stands. That it already stood there in the closing years of the
eleventh century is proved by a charter, quoted by M. d’Espinay
(Revue historique de l’Anjou, vol. viii. p. 200, note 2) from the
cartulary of S. Aubin’s Abbey, giving an account of a meeting held “in
domibus episcopalibus juxta S. Mauricium Andegavorum matrem
ecclesiam,” in A.D. 1098.
So much for the position of the bishop’s dwelling from 851
downwards. Of the position of the count’s palace—the abode of Odo
and his successors, built on the piece of land near the city wall—the
first indication is in an account of a great fire at Angers in 1132:
“Flante Aquilone, accensus est in mediâ civitate ignis, videlicet apud
S. Anianum; et tanto incendio grassatus est ut ecclesiam S. Laudi et
omnes officinas, deinde comitis aulam et omnes cameras
miserabiliter combureret et in cinerem redigeret. Sicque per
Aquariam descendens,” etc. (Chron. S. Serg. a. 1132, Marchegay,
Eglises, p. 144). The church of S. Laud was the old chapel of S.
Geneviève,—“capella B. Genovefæ virginis, infra muros civitatis
Andegavæ, ante forum videlicet comitalis aulæ posita,” as it is
described in a charter of Geoffrey Martel (Revue Hist. de l’Anjou,
1872, vol. viii. p. 161)—the exact position of a ruined chapel which
was still visible, some twenty years ago, within the castle enclosure,
not far from the hall which still remains. A fire beginning in the middle
of the city and carried by a north-east wind down to S. Laud and the
Evière would not touch the present bishop’s palace, but could not fail
to pass over the site of the castle. The last witness is Ralf de Diceto
(Stubbs, vol. i. pp. 291, 292), who distinctly places the palace of the
counts in his own day—the day of Count Henry Fitz-Empress—in the
south-west corner of the city, with the river at its feet and the vine-
clad hills at its back; and his description of the “thalami noviter
constructi” just fits in with the account of the fire, the destruction
thereby wrought having doubtless been followed by a rebuilding on a
more regal scale. It seems impossible to doubt the conclusion of
these Angevin archæologists, that the dwelling of the bishops and
the palace of the counts have occupied their present sites ever since
the ninth century. In that case the present synodal hall, an
undoubted work of the early twelfth century, must have been
originally built for none other than its present use; and to a student of
the history of the Angevin counts and kings the most precious relic in
all Angers is the ruined hall looking out upon the Mayenne from over
the castle ramparts. M. d’Espinay denies its Roman origin; he
considers it to be a work of the tenth century or beginning of the
eleventh—the one fragment, in fact, of the dwelling-place of Geoffrey
Greygown and Fulk the Black which has survived, not only the fire of
1132, but also the later destruction in which the apartments built by
Henry have perished.

Note C.
THE MARRIAGES OF GEOFFREY GREYGOWN.

The marriages of Geoffrey Greygown form a subject at once of

some importance and of considerable difficulty. It seems plain that
Geoffrey was twice married, that both his wives bore the same
name, Adela or Adelaide, and that the second was in her own right
countess of Chalon-sur-Saône, and widow of Lambert, count of
Autun. There is no doubt about this second marriage, for we have
documentary evidence that a certain Count Maurice (about whom
the Angevin writers make great blunders, and of whom we shall hear
more later on) was brother at once to Hugh of Chalon, son of
Lambert and Adela, and to Fulk, son of Geoffrey Greygown, and
must therefore have been a son of Geoffrey and Adela. A charter,
dated between 992 and 998 (see Mabille, Introd. Comtes, pp. lxx–
lxxi), wherein Hugh, count of Chalon, describes himself as “son of
Adelaide and Lambert who was count of Chalon in right of his wife,”
is approved by “Adelaide his mother and Maurice his brother.” Now
as R. Glaber (l. iii. c. 2; Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 27) declares that
Hugh had no brother, Maurice must have been his half-brother, i.e.
son of his mother and her second husband; and that that second
husband was Geoffrey Greygown appears by several charters in
which Maurice is named as brother of Fulk Nerra.
It is by no means clear who this Adela or Adelaide of Chalon was.
Perry (Hist. de Chalon-sur-Saône, p. 86) and Arbois de Jubainville
(Comtes de Champagne, vol. i. p. 140) say she was daughter of
Robert of Vermandois, count of Troyes, and Vera, daughter of Gilbert
of Burgundy and heiress of Chalon, which at her death passed to
Adela as her only child. But the only authority for this Vera,
Odorannus the monk of S. Peter of Sens, says she was married in
956, and Lambert called himself count of Chalon in 960 (Perry, Hist.
Chalon, preuves, p. 35. See also Arbois de Jubainville as above), so
that if he married Vera’s daughter he must have married a child only
three years old. And to add to the confusion, Robert of Troyes’s wife
in 959 signs a charter by the name of “Adelais” (Duchesne, Maison
de Vergy, preuves, p. 36). What concerns us most, however, is not
Adela’s parentage, but the date of her marriage with Geoffrey
Greygown; or, which comes to much the same thing, the date of her
first husband’s death. The cartulary of Paray-le-Monial (Lambert’s
foundation) gives the date of his death as February 22, 988. If that
were correct, Geoffrey, who died in July 987, could not have married
Adela at all, unless she was divorced and remarried during
Lambert’s life. This idea is excluded by a charter of her grandson
Theobald, which distinctly says that Geoffrey married her after
Lambert’s death (Perry, Hist. Chalon, preuves, p. 39); therefore the
Art de vérifier les Dates (vol. xi. p. 129) proposes to omit an x and
read 978. Adela and Geoffrey, then, cannot have married earlier than
the end of 978. Geoffrey, however, must have been married long
before this, if his daughter Hermengard was married in 970 to Conan
of Britanny (Morice, Hist. Bret., vol. i. p. 63. His authority seems to
be a passage in the Chron. S. Michael. a. 970, printed in Labbe’s
Bibl. Nova MSS. Librorum, vol. i. p. 350, where, however, the bride is
absurdly made a daughter of Fulk Nerra instead of Geoffrey
Greygown). And in Duchesne’s Maison de Vergy, preuves, p. 39, is
the will, dated March 6, 974, of a Countess Adela, wife of a Count
Geoffrey, whereby she bequeathes some lands to S. Aubin’s Abbey
at Angers; and as the Chron. S. Albin. a. 974 (Marchegay, Eglises, p.
20) also mentions these donations, there can be little doubt that she
was the wife of Geoffrey of Anjou. M. Mabille (Introd. Comtes, p. lxx)
asserts that this Adela, Geoffrey Greygown’s first wife, was Adela of
Vermandois, sister of Robert of Troyes, and appeals to the will above
referred to in proof of his assertion; the will, however, says nothing of
the sort. He also makes the second Adela sister-in-law instead of
daughter to Robert (ib. p. lxxi). It seems indeed hopeless to decide
on the parentage of either of these ladies; that of their children is,
however, the only question really important for us. Hermengard,
married in 970 to the duke of Britanny, was clearly a child of
Geoffrey’s first wife; Maurice was as clearly a child of the second; but
whose child was Fulk the Black? Not only is it a matter of some
interest to know who was the mother of the greatest of the Angevins,
but it is a question on whose solution may depend the solution of
another difficulty:—the supposed, but as yet unascertained, kindred
between Fulk’s son Geoffrey Martel and his wife Agnes of Burgundy.
If Fulk was the son of Geoffrey Greygown and Adela of Chalon, the
whole pedigree is clear, and stands thus:
1 2
Lambert = Adela = Geoffrey
｜ ｜
Adalbert = Gerberga Fulk
of Lombardy
 ｜ ｜
Otto William ｜
｜ ｜
Agnes = Geoffrey.

The two last would thus be cousins in the third degree of kindred
according to the canon law. The only apparent difficulty of this theory
is that it makes Fulk so very young. The first child of Adela of Chalon
and Geoffrey cannot have been born earlier than 979, even if Adela
remarried before her first year of widowhood was out; and we find
Fulk Nerra heading his troops in 992, if not before. But the thing is
not impossible. Such precocity would not be much greater than that
of Richard the Fearless, or of Fulk’s own rival Odo of Blois; and such
a wonderful man as Fulk the Black may well have been a wonderful
boy.

Note D.
THE BRETON AND POITEVIN WARS OF GEOFFREY

GREYGOWN.

The acts of Geoffrey Greygown in the Gesta Consulum are a

mass of fable. The fight with the Dane Æthelwulf and that with the
Saxon Æthelred are mythical on the face of them, and the writer’s
habitual defiance of chronology is carried to its highest point in this
chapter. From him we turn to the story of Fulk Rechin. “Ille igitur
Gosfridus Grisa Gonella, pater avi mei Fulconis, cujus probitates
enumerare non possumus, excussit Laudunum de manu Pictavensis
comitis, et in prœlio superavit eum super Rupes, et persecutus est
eum usque ad Mirebellum. Et fugavit Britones, qui venerant
Andegavim cum prædatorio exercitu, quorum duces erant filii Isoani
(Conani). Et postea fuit cum duce Hugone in obsidione apud
Marsonum, ubi arripuit eum infirmitas quâ exspiravit; et corpus illius
allatum est Turonum et sepultum in ecclesiâ B. Martini” (Fulk Rechin,
Marchegay, Comtes, p. 376).
Whoever was the author of this account, he clearly knew or cared
nothing about the stories of the monkish writers, but had a perfectly
distinct source of information unknown to them. For their legends he
substitutes two things: a war with the count of Poitou, and a war with
the duke of Britanny. On each of these wars we get some
information from one other authority; the question is how to make
this other authority tally with Fulk.
1. As to the Breton war, which seems to be the earlier in date.
No one but Fulk mentions the raid of Conan’s sons upon Angers;
and M. Mabille (Introd. Comtes, p. xlviii) objects to it on the ground
that Conan’s sons were not contemporaries of Geoffrey.
Conan of Rennes was killed in 992 in a battle with Geoffrey’s son.
He had been married in 970 to Geoffrey’s daughter Hermengard
(see above, pp. 121, 135). Now a daughter of Geoffrey in 970 must
have been almost a child, but it by no means follows that her
husband was equally young. On the contrary, he seems to have
been sufficiently grown up to take a part in politics twenty years
before (Morice, Hist. Bret. vol. i. p. 62). It is certain that he had
several sons; it is certain that two at least of them were not
Hermengard’s; it is likely that none of them were, except his
successor Geoffrey. Supposing Conan was somewhat over fifty
when killed (and he may have been older still) that would make him
about thirty when he married Hermengard; he might have had sons
ten years before that, and those sons might very easily head an
attack upon their stepmother’s father in 980 or thereabouts. Surely
M. Mabille here makes a needless stumbling-block of the
chronology.
If no other writer confirms Fulk’s story, neither does any contradict
it. But in the Gesta Consulum (Marchegay, Comtes, pp. 91–93) an
exactly similar tale is told, only in much more detail and with this one
difference, that Fulk Nerra is substituted for Geoffrey Greygown, and
the raid is made to take place just before that other battle of
Conquereux, in 992, in which Conan perished. The only question
now is, which date is the likeliest, Fulk’s or John’s? in other words,
which of these two writers is the better to be trusted? Surely there
can be no doubt about the choice, and we must conclude that, for
once, the monk who credits Greygown with so many exploits that he
never performed has denied him the honour of one to which he is
really entitled.
Fulk Rechin’s account of Geoffrey’s Breton war ends here. The
Breton chroniclers ignore this part of the affair altogether; they seem
to take up the thread of the story where the Angevin drops it. It is
they who tell us of the homage of Guerech, and of the battle of
Conquereux; and their accounts of the latter are somewhat puzzling.
The Chron. Britann. in Lobineau (Hist. Bret., vol. ii. col. 32) says:
“982. Primum bellum Britannorum et Andegavorum in Concruz.” The
Chron. S. Michael. (Labbe, Bibl. Nova, vol. i. p. 350; Rer. Gall.
Scriptt., vol. ix. p. 98) says: “981. Conanus Curvus contra
Andegavenses in Concurrum optime pugnavit.” But in the other two
Breton chronicles the Angevins do not appear. The Chron.
Namnetense (Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. viii. p. 278) describes the battle
as one between Conan and Guerech; the Chron. Briocense (Morice,
Hist. Bret., preuves, vol. i. col. 32) does the same, and moreover
adds that Conan was severely wounded in the right arm and fled
defeated. This last is the only distinct record of the issue of the
battle; nevertheless there are some little indications which, taken
together, give some ground for thinking its record is wrong. 1st.
There is the negative evidence of the silence of the Angevin writers
about the whole affair; they ignore the first battle of Conquereux as
completely as the Bretons ignore the unsuccessful raid of Conan’s
sons. This looks as if each party chronicled its own successes, and
carefully avoided mentioning those of its adversaries. 2d. In the Hist.
S. Flor. Salm. (Marchegay, Eglises, p. 260) is a proverb “Bellum
Conquerentium quo tortum superavit rectum”—an obvious pun on
Conan’s nickname, “Tortus” or “Curvus.” It is there quoted as having
arisen from the battle of Conquereux in 992—the only one which it
suits the Angevin writers to admit. But this is nonsense, for the writer
has himself just told us that in that battle Conan was defeated and
slain. Therefore “the crooked overcame the straight,” i.e. Conan won
the victory, in an earlier battle of Conquereux.
But how then are we to account for the Chronicle of St. Brieuc’s
very circumstantial statement of Conan’s defeat?—This chronicle—a
late compilation—is our only authority for all the details of the war;
for Guerech’s capture and homage, and in short for all matters
specially relating to Nantes. The tone of all this part of it shews
plainly that its compiler, or more likely the earlier writer whom he was
here copying, was a violently patriotic man of Nantes, who hated the
Rennes party and the Angevins about equally, and whose chief aim
was to depreciate them both and exalt the house of Nantes in the
person of Guerech. So great is his spite against the Angevins that he
will not even allow them the credit of having slain Conan at the
second battle of Conquereux, but says Conan fell in a fight with
some rebel subjects of his own! He therefore still more naturally
ignores the Angevin share in the first battle of Conquereux, and
makes his hero Guerech into a triumphant victor. The cause of his
hatred to Anjou is of course the mean trick whereby Geoffrey
obtained Guerech’s homage. There can be little doubt that the battle
was after this homage—was in fact caused by it; but the facts are
quite enough to account for the Nantes writer putting, as he does,
the battle first, before he brings the Angevins in at all, and giving all
the glory to Guerech.
2. As to the Poitevin war. “Excussit Laudunum,” etc. (Fulk Rechin,
Marchegay, Comtes, p. 376. See above, p. 137).
The only other mention of this war is in the Chron. S. Maxent.
(Marchegay, Eglises, p. 384), which says: “Eo tempore gravissimum
bellum inter Willelmum ducem et Gofridum Andegavensem comitem
peractum est. Sed Gaufridus, necessitatibus actus, Willelmo duci se
subdidit seque in manibus præbuit, et ab eo Lausdunum castrum
cum nonnullis aliis in Pictavensi pago beneficio accepit.” M. Mabille
pronounces these two accounts incompatible; but are they? The
Poitevin account, taken literally and alone, looks rather odd. William
and Geoffrey fight; Geoffrey is “compelled by necessity” to make
submission to William—but he is invested by his conqueror with
Loudun and other fiefs. That is, the practical gain is on the side of
the beaten party. On the other hand, Fulk Rechin, taken literally and
alone, gives no hint of any submission on Geoffrey’s part. But why
cannot the two accounts be made to supplement and correct each
other, as in the case of the Breton war? The story would then stand
thus: Geoffrey takes Loudun and defeats William at Les Roches, as
Fulk says. Subsequent reverses compel him to agree to terms so far
that he holds his conquests as fiefs of the count of Poitou.
The case is nearly parallel to that of the Breton war; again the
Angevin count and the hostile chronicler tell the story between them,
each telling the half most agreeable to himself, and the two halves fit
into a whole.
M. Mabille’s last objection is that the real Fulk Rechin would have
known better than to say that Geoffrey pursued William as far as
Mirebeau, a place which had no existence till the castle was built by
Fulk Nerra in 1000. Why should he not have meant simply “the place
where Mirebeau now stands”? And even if he did think the name
existed in Greygown’s day, what does that prove against his identity?
Why should not Count Fulk make slips as well as other people?
The date of the war is matter of guess-work. The S. Maxentian
chronicler’s “eo tempore” comes between 989 and 996, i.e. after
Geoffrey’s death. One can only conjecture that it should have come
just at the close of his life.

Note E.
THE GRANT OF MAINE TO GEOFFREY GREYGOWN.

That a grant of the county of Maine was made by Hugh Capet to a

count of Anjou is pretty clear from the later history; that the grant was
made to Geoffrey Greygown is not so certain. The story comes only
from the Angevin historians; and they seem to have systematically
carried back to the time of Greygown all the claims afterwards put
forth by the counts of Anjou to what did not belong to them. They
evidently knew nothing of his real history, so they used him as a
convenient lay figure on which to hang all pretensions that wanted a
foundation and all stories that wanted a hero, in total defiance of
facts and dates. They have transferred to him one exploit whose
hero, if he was an Angevin count at all, could only have been Fulk
Nerra—the capture of Melun in 999. An examination of this story will
be more in place when we come to the next count; but it rouses a
suspicion that after all Geoffrey may have had no more to do with
Maine than with Melun.—The story of the grant of Maine in the
Gesta Consulum (Marchegay, Comtes, pp. 77, 78) stands thus:
David, count of Maine, and Geoffrey, count of Corbon, refuse
homage to king Robert. The king summons his barons to help him,
among them the count of Anjou. The loyal Geoffrey takes his rebel
namesake’s castle of Mortagne and compels him to submit to the
king; David still holds out, whereupon Robert makes a formal grant
of “him and his Cenomannia” to Greygown and his heirs for ever.
On this M. l’abbé Voisin (Les Cénomans anciens et modernes, p.
337) remarks: “Cette chronique renferme avec un fonds de vérité
des détails évidemment érronés; le Geoffroy d’Anjou, dont il est ici
question, n’est pas suffisamment connu. C’est à lui que Guillaume
de Normandie fait rendre hommage par son fils Robert; c’est lui,
sans doute, qui, suivant les historiens de Mayenne, fut seigneur de
cette ville et commanda quelque temps dans le Maine et l’Anjou,
sous Louis d’Outremer; au milieu d’une assemblée des comtes et
des barons de son parti, Robert l’aurait investi de ce qu’il possédait
alors dans ces deux provinces.”
The Abbé’s story is quite as puzzling as the monk’s. His mention
of Robert of Normandy is inexplicable, for it can refer to nothing but
the homage of Robert Curthose to Geoffrey the Bearded in 1063. His
meaning, however, seems to be that the Geoffrey in question was
not Greygown at all, but another Geoffrey of whom he says in p. 353
that he was son of Aubert of Lesser Maine, and “gouverneur d’Anjou
et du Maine, sous Louis IV. roi de France; il avait épousé une dame
de la maison de Bretagne, dont on ignore le nom; il eu eut trois fils;
Juhel, Aubert et Guérin; il mourut l’an 890.” This passage M. Voisin
gives as a quotation, but without a reference. He then goes on:
“Nous avons cherché précédemment à expliquer de quelle manière
ce Geoffroi se serait posé en rival de Hugues-David;” and he adds a
note: “D’autres aimeront peut-être mieux supposer une erreur de
nom et de date dans la Chronique” [what chronicle?] “et dire qu’il
s’agit de Foulques-le-Bon.” There is no need to “suppose”; a man
who died in 890 could not be count of anything under Louis IV. But
where did M. Voisin find this other Geoffrey, and how does his
appearance mend the matter? He seems to think the Gesta-writers
have transferred this man’s doings to their own hero Greygown, by
restoring them to what he considers their rightful owner he finds no
difficulty in accepting the date, temp. King Robert. But the Abbé’s
King Robert is not the Gesta-writers’ King Robert. He means Robert
I., in 923; they mean Robert II., though no doubt they have confused
the two. In default of evidence for M. Voisin’s story we must take that
of the Gesta as it stands and see what can be made of it.
In 923, the time of Robert I., Geoffrey Greygown was not born,
and Anjou was held by his grandfather Fulk the Red. In 996–1031,
the time of Robert II., Geoffrey was dead, and Anjou was held by his
son Fulk the Black. Moreover, according to M. Voisin, David of Maine
died at latest in 970, and Geoffrey of Corbon lived 1026–1040.
From all this it results:
1. If Maine was granted to a count of Anjou by Robert I., it was not
to Geoffrey Greygown.
2. If it was granted by Robert II., it was also not to Geoffrey.
3. If it was granted to Geoffrey, it can only have been by Hugh
Capet.
There is one writer who does bring Hugh into the affair: “Electo
autem a Francis communi consilio, post obitum Lotharii, Hugone
Capet in regem ... cum regnum suum circuiret, Turonisque
descendens Cenomannensibusque consulem imponeret,” etc.
(Gesta Ambaz. Domin., Marchegay, Comtes, p. 160). He does not
say who this new count was, but there can be little doubt it was the
reigning count of Anjou; and this, just after Hugh’s accession, would
be Fulk Nerra. On the other hand, the writer ignores Louis V. and
makes Hugh succeed Lothar. Did he mean to place these events in
that year, 986–7, when Hugh was king de facto but not de jure? In
that case the count would be Geoffrey Greygown.
The compilers of the Gesta, however, simplify all these old claims
by stating that the king (i.e. the duke) gave Geoffrey a sort of carte-
blanche to take and keep anything he could get: “dedit Gosfrido
comiti quidquid Rex Lotarius in episcopatibus suis habuerat,
Andegavensi scilicet et Cenomannensi. Si qua vero alia ipse vel
successores sui adquirere poterant, eâ libertate quâ ipse tenebat sibi
commendata concessit.” Gesta Cons. (Marchegay, Comtes), p. 76.
 Map II.

Wagner & Debes’ Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. Leipsic.

London, Macmillan & Co.

 CHAPTER III.
ANJOU AND BLOIS.

987–1044.

One of the wildest of the legends which have gathered round the
Angevin house tells how a count of Anjou had wedded a lady of
unknown origin and more than earthly beauty, who excited the
suspicions of those around her by her marked dislike to entering a
church, and her absolute refusal to be present at the consecration of
the Host. At last her husband, urged by his friends, resolved to
compel her to stay. By his order, when the Gospel was ended and
she was about to leave the church as usual, she was stopped by
four armed men. As they laid hold of her mantle she shook it from
her shoulders; two of her little children stood beneath its folds at her
right hand, two at her left. The two former she left behind, the latter
she caught up in her arms, and, floating away through a window of
the church, she was seen on earth no more. “What wonder,” was the
comment of Richard Cœur-de-Lion upon this story; “what wonder if
we lack the natural affections of mankind—we who come from the
devil, and must needs go back to the devil?”[293]

[293] Girald. Cambr. De Instr. Princ., dist. iii. c. 27 (Angl. Christ.

Soc., p. 154).

One is tempted to think that the excited brains of the closing tenth
century, filled with dim presages of horror that were floating about in
expectation of the speedy end of the world, must have wrought out
this strange tale by way of explaining the career of Fulk the Black.
[294] His contemporaries may well have reckoned him among the
phenomena of the time; they may well have had recourse to a theory
of supernatural agency or demoniac possession to account for the
rapid developement of talents and passions which both alike seemed
almost more than human. When the county of Anjou was left to him
by the death of his father Geoffrey Greygown, Fulk was a child
scarce eight years old.[295] Surrounded by powerful foes whom
Geoffrey’s aggressions had provoked rather than checked—without
an ally or protector unless it were the new king—Fulk began life with
everything against him. Yet before he has reached the years of
manhood the young count meets us at every turn, and always in
triumph. Throughout the fifty-three years of his reign Fulk is one of
the most conspicuous and brilliant figures in French history. His
character seems at times strangely self-contradictory. Mad bursts of
passion, which would have been the ruin of an ordinary man, but
which seem scarcely to have made a break in his cool, calculating,
far-seeing policy; a rapid and unerring perception of his own ends, a
relentless obstinacy in pursuing them, an utter disregard of the
wrong and suffering which their pursuit might involve; and then ever
and anon fits of vehement repentance, ignorant, blind, fruitless as far
as any lasting amendment was concerned, yet at once awe-striking
and touching in its short-lived, wrong-headed earnestness—all these
seeming contradictions yet make up, not a puzzling abstraction, but
an intensely living character—the character, in a word, of the typical
Angevin count.

[294] “Fulco Nerra” or “Niger,” “Palmerius” and

“Hierosolymitanus” are his historical surnames. I can find no hint
whether the first was derived from his complexion or from the
colour of the armour which he usually wore (as in the case of the
“Black Prince”); the origin of the two last will be seen later.

[295] This is on the supposition that Adela of Chalon was his

mother; see note C to chap. ii. above.

For more than a hundred years after the accession of Hugh Capet,
the history of the kingdom which he founded consists chiefly of the
struggles of the great feudataries among themselves to get and to
keep control over the action of the crown. The duke of the French
had gained little save in name by his royal coronation and unction.
He was no nearer than his Karolingian predecessors had been to
actual supremacy over the Norman duchy, the Breton peninsula, and
the whole of southern Gaul. Aquitaine indeed passed from cold
contempt to open aggression. When one of her princes, the count of
Poitou, had at length made unwilling submission to the northern king,
a champion of southern independence issued from far Périgord to
punish him, stormed Poitiers, marched up to the Loire, and sat down
in triumph before Tours, whose count, Odo of Blois, was powerless
to relieve it. The king himself could find no more practical
remonstrance than the indignant question, “Who made thee count?”
and the sole reply vouchsafed by Adalbert of Périgord was the fair
retort, “Who made thee king?” Tours fell into his hands, and was
made over, perhaps in mockery, to the youthful count of Anjou. The
loyalty of its governor and citizens, however, soon restored it to its
lawful owner, and Adalbert’s dreams of conquest ended in failure
and retreat.[296] Still, Aquitaine remained independent as of old;
Hugh’s real kingdom took in little more than the old duchy of France
“between Seine and Loire”; and even within these limits it almost
seemed that in grasping at the shadow of the crown he had
loosened his hold on the substance of his ducal power. The regal
authority was virtually a tool in the hands of whichever feudatary
could secure its exercise for his own ends. As yet Aquitaine and
Britanny stood aloof from the struggle; Normandy had not yet
entered upon it; at present therefore it lay between the vassals of the
duchy of France. Foremost among them in power, wealth, and extent
of territory was the count of Blois, Chartres and Tours. His dominions
pressed close against the eastern border of Anjou, and it was on her
ability to cope with him that her fate chiefly depended. Was the
house of Anjou or the house of Blois to win the pre-eminence in
central Gaul? This was the problem which confronted Fulk the Black,
and to whose solution he devoted his life. His whole course was
governed by one fixed principle and directed to one paramount
object—the consolidation of his marchland. To that object everything
else was made subservient. Every advantage thrown in his way by
circumstances, by the misfortunes, mistakes or weaknesses of foes
or friends—for he used the one as unscrupulously as the other—was
caught up and pursued with relentless vigour. One thread of settled
policy ran through the seemingly tangled skein of his life, a thread
never broken even by the wildest outbursts of his almost demoniac
temper or his superstitious alarms. While he seemed to be throwing
his whole energies into the occupation of the moment—whether it
were the building or the besieging of a fortress, the browbeating of
bishop or king, the cajoling of an ally or the crushing of a rival on the
battle-field—that work was in reality only a part of a much greater
work. Every town mirrored in the clear streams that water the
“garden of France”—as the people of Touraine call their beautiful
country—has its tale of the Black Count, the “great builder” beneath
whose hands the whole lower course of the Loire gradually came to
bristle with fortresses; but far above all his castles of stone and
mortar there towered a castle in the air, the plan of a mighty political
edifice. Every act of his life was a step towards its realization; every
fresh success in his long career of triumph was another stone added
to the gradual building up of Angevin dominion and greatness.

[296] Ademar of Chabanais, Rer. Gall. Scriptt., vol. x. p. 146.

The date seems to be about 990; but Ademar has confused Odo
I. of Blois with his son Odo of Champagne.

Fulk’s first victory was won before he was fourteen, over a veteran
commander who had been more than a match for his father ten
years earlier. The death of Geoffrey Greygown was soon followed by
that of Count Guerech of Nantes; he, too, left only a young son,
Alan; and when Alan also died in 990, Conan of Rennes, already
master of all the rest of Britanny, seized his opportunity to take
forcible possession of Nantes,[297] little dreaming of a possible rival
in his young brother-in-law beyond the Mayenne. While his back was
turned and he was busy assembling troops at Bruerech, at the other
end of Britanny, the Angevin worked upon the old hatred of the
Nantes people to the house of Rennes; with the craft of his race he
won over some of the guards, by fair words and solid bribes, till he
gained admittance into the city and received oaths and hostages
from its inhabitants. He then returned home to collect troops for an
attack upon the citadel, which was held by Conan’s men. Conan, as
soon as he heard the tidings, marched upon Nantes with all his
forces; as before, he brought with him a body of Norman auxiliaries,
likely to be of no small use in assaulting a place such as Nantes,
whose best defence is its broad river—for the “Pirates” had not yet
forgotten the days when the water was their natural element and the
long keels were their most familiar home. While the Norman ships
blocked the river, Conan’s troops beset the town by land, and thus,
with the garrison shooting down at them from the citadel, the
townsfolk of Nantes were between three fires when Fulk advanced to
their rescue.[298] Conan at once sent the audacious boy a challenge
to meet him, on such a day, in a pitched battle on the field of
Conquereux, where ten years before a doubtful fight had been
waged between Conan and Fulk’s father. This time the Bretons
trusted to lure their enemies to complete destruction by a device
which, in days long after, was successfully employed by Robert
Bruce against the English army at Bannockburn; they dug a series of
trenches right across the swampy moor, covered them with bushes,
branches, leaves and thatch, supported by uprights stuck into the
ditches, and strewed the surface with ferns till it was
indistinguishable from the surrounding moorland. Behind this line of
hidden pitfalls Conan drew up his host, making a feint of
unwillingness to begin the attack. Fulk, panting for his first battle with
all the ardour of youth, urged his men to the onset; the flower of the
Angevin troops charged right into the Breton pitfalls; men and horses
became hopelessly entangled; two thousand went down in the
swampy abyss and were drowned, slaughtered or crushed to death.
[299] The rest fled in disorder; Fulk himself was thrown from his horse
and fell to the ground, weighed down by his armour, perhaps too
heavy for his boyish frame. In an instant he was up again, wild with
rage, burning to avenge his overthrow, calling furiously upon his
troops. The clear, young voice of their leader revived the courage of
the Angevins; “as the storm-wind sweeps down upon the thick corn-
rigs”[300]—so their historian tells—they rushed upon the foe; and
their momentary panic was avenged by the death of Conan and the
almost total destruction of his host.[301] The blow overthrew the