ABSTRACT
The French monarchy would have returned to something like the situation that had faced Louis VII and Philip Augustus at the height of Henry II’s power. Charles I of Anjou’s key fiefs were Anjou and Maine, including suzerainty over the count of Vendome and the viscounts of Mayenne and Laval, but excluding Fontevraud and the regalian rights over bishoprics which Louis had restored to the bishops of Angers and Le Mans. Charles and Alphonse of Poitiers together unsuccessfully pursued another claim at the expense of Louis IX. Charles’s ambitious self-aggrandizement has been condemned over the generations. The county of Hainault was imperial, not French, territory. But since Charles’s adventures there between 1253 and 1256 were inspired by Marguerite, countess of Flanders, one of the most important French fief-holders, in defiance of an arbitration made by Louis IX in 1246, the incident belongs to French as much as to imperial political history.
