is shoulders, the
Count had himself dragged by a halter through the streets of Jerusalem,
and courted the doom of martyrdom by his wild outcries of penitence. He
rewarded the fidelity of Herbert of Le Mans, whose aid saved him from
utter ruin, by entrapping him into captivity and robbing him of his
lands. He secured the terrified friendship of the French king by
despatching twelve assassins to cut down before his eyes the minister who
had troubled it. Familiar as the age was with treason and rapine and
blood, it recoiled from the cool cynicism of his crimes, and believed the
wrath of Heaven to have been revealed against the union of the worst
forms of evil in Fulk the Black. But neither the wrath of Heaven nor the
curses of men broke with a single mishap the fifty years of his success.

At his accession in 987 Anjou was the least important of the greater
provinces of France. At his death in 1040 it stood, if not in extent, at
least in real power, first among them all. Cool-headed, clear-sighted,
quick to resolve, quicker to strike, Fulk's career was one long series of
victories over all his rivals. He was a consummate general, and he had
the gift of personal bravery, which was denied to some of his greatest
descendants. There was a moment in the first of his battles when the day
seemed lost for Anjou; a feigned retreat of the Bretons drew the Angevin
horsemen into a line of hidden pitfalls, and the Count himself was flung
heavily to the ground. Dragged from the medley of men and horses, he
swept down almost singly on the foe "as a storm-wind" (so rang the paean
of the Angevins) "sweeps down on the thick corn-rows," and the field was
won. But to these qualities of the warrior he added a power of political
organization, a capacity for far-reaching combinations, a faculty of
statesmanship, which became the heritage of his race, and lifted them as
high above the intellectual level of the rulers of their time as their
shameless wickedness degraded them below the level of man. His overthrow
of Britanny on the field of Conquereux was followed by the gradual
absorption of Southern Touraine; a victory at Pontlevoi crushed the rival
house of Blois; the seizure of Saumur completed his conquests in the
south, while Northern Touraine was won bit by bit till only Tours
resisted the Angevin. The treacherous seizure of its Count, Herbert
Wakedog, left Maine at his mercy.

[Sidenote: Death of Henry]

His work of conquest was complet