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Rh wool no longer sufficed to occupy the workmen. Wool from neighbouring countries was sent in great quantities to the Flemish fairs, and already commerce was bringing Flanders into contact with England, Germany, and Scandinavia.

Champagne and Blois. The contrast with the territories of the Counts of Champagne is striking. Here there is no unity; the lands ruled by the count have no cohesion whatever; only the chances of succession which at the opening of the eleventh century caused the counties of Troyes and Meaux to pass into the hands of Odo II, Count of Blois, Tours and Chartres (996-1037).

The count's power, naturally, suffered from the scattered position of his lands. The first to unite under his authority the two principalities of Blois and Champagne, Odo II, has left in history only a reputation for blundering activity and perpetual mutability. In Touraine, in place of steadily resisting the encroaching policy of the Counts of Anjou, we find him rushing headlong into one wild enterprise after another, invading Lorraine on the morrow of his defeat by Fulk Nerra at Pontlevoy in 1016, then joining with reckless eagerness in the chimerical projects of Robert the Pious for dismembering the inheritance of the Emperor Henry II (1024), and upon the death of Rodolph III, flinging himself upon the kingdom of Burgundy (1032). We shall see how the adventurer fared, how Odo, after a brilliant and rapid campaign, found himself face to face with the Emperor Conrad, threatened not only by him but by Henry I King of France, whose enmity, by a triumph of unskilful handling, he had brought upon himself. A prompt retreat alone saved him. But it was only to throw himself into a new project; he at once invaded Lorraine, carrying fire and sword through the country; he began negotiations with the Italian prelates with a view to obtaining the Lombard crown, and even dreamed of an expedition to Aix-la-Chapelle to snatch the imperial sceptre from his rival. But the army of Lorraine had assembled to bar his way; a battle was fought on 15 November 1037, in the neighbourhood of Bar, and Odo met with a pitiful end on the field of carnage where his stripped and mutilated body was found next day.

With the successors of Odo II came almost complete obscurity. The counties of Champagne and Blois, separated for a brief interval by his death, then re-united up to 1090 under the rule of Theobald III, go on in an uneventful course, diminished by the loss of Touraine, which the Counts of Anjou succeed in definitely annexing.

Burgundy. The history of the duchy of Burgundy in the eleventh century is hardly less obscure. Its Dukes, Robert I, son of King Robert the Pious, Hugh and Odo Borel seem to have been insignificant enough, with neither domains, nor money, nor a policy. Although theoretically they