No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
This book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the politics and the culture of the kingdom of France in the twelfth century. The county of Champagne was one of the great principalities which made up the kingdom, and in the twelfth century, the counts of Champagne, along with the counts of Flanders and the dukes of Normandy (who were also kings of England), often overshadowed the French king, certainly in terms of courtliness, cultural patronage and administrative sophistication. Henry, known as the Liberal, was count of Champagne from 1152 until his death in 1181. His connections were impeccable. A great-grandson of William the Conqueror, and thus related to the kings of England, he became both brother-in-law and son-in-law of King Louis VII of France, and lived to see his nephew become king as Philip II Augustus. His father, often known as Count Theobald the Great, had begun to develop the economic potential of the lands of the county of Champagne, sited on the routes that ran from England and the industrially precocious Low Countries to Italy, and had, through his own personal piety and connection with reformed, especially Cistercian, monasticism, brought prestige and political weight to the county. Count Theobald, who was count of Blois-Chartres as well as Champagne, was close to his uncle, Henry I of England, and tended to find himself at odds with the Capetian kings of France. Evergates shows how Henry the Liberal, on the other hand, aligned himself politically with the king of France rather than the king of England, and how Henry took advantage of the resultant peace to turn the county of Champagne into a centre of trade, a beacon of good governance, and one of the most important cultural centres of twelfth century Europe. Evergates argues cogently that it was ‘Henry’s singular achievement, to construct a major new polity, the county of Champagne, and to endow it with the institutions and identity as a province in early modern France that would survive his dynasty’.
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.