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130 neighbour's territory and immediately took possession of the lands that he coveted. In 1100, on the return of Raymond of St-Gilles, he was forced to restore his conquest. The struggle was only postponed; on the death of Bertrand, son of Raymond, in 1112, he was again to conquer the county of Toulouse, and, this time, refuse to surrender his prey. It took Alphonse-Jourdain, the rightful heir, ten years of desperate strife to gain his point and tear the booty from his terrible neighbour.

This same William IX is besides the very type of a feudal "bel esprit," possessed of a pretty wit and apt at celebrating his endless amours and intrigues in graceful, profligate verse, but he was shameless and brazen, trampling the principles of morality underfoot as old-fashioned prejudices, provided that he could indulge his passions. The carrying-off of Maubergeon, the beautiful wife of the Viscount of Châtellerault, whom he claimed to marry without further formalities, in the life-time of his lawful wife, Philippa, and of the Viscount himself, gives one the measure of the man. If we may believe the chronicler, William of Malmesbury, he replied with jests to the prelates who exhorted him to change his manner of living: "I will repudiate the Viscountess as soon as your hair requires a comb," he said to the Bishop of Angoulême, Gerard, who was bald. Being excommunicated for his evil courses, he one day met Peter, Bishop of Poitiers. "Give me absolution or I will kill you," he cried, raising his sword. "Strike," replied the bishop, offering his neck. "No," replied William, "I do not love you well enough to send you straight to Paradise," and he contented himself with exiling him.

Languedoc. Less fortunate and much less skilful than the Dukes of Aquitaine, the Counts of Toulouse nevertheless succeeded in the eleventh century in collecting in their own hands a considerable group of fiefs, all contiguous: they included fiefs within the Empire as well as in France, and stretched from the Garonne to the Alps from the day when Raymond of Saint-Gilles, Marquess of Gothia, had succeeded both his brother William IV in the county of Toulouse (1088) and Bertrand of Arles in the Marquessate of Provence (1094). But even taking Languedoc alone (the county of Toulouse and the Marquessate of Gothia) the unity of the state was only personal and weak, and was always on the point of breaking down. A law of succession which prescribed division between the direct heirs male necessarily involved the division of the component fiefs; besides this, the chiefs of the house of Toulouse had not the continuity of policy necessary if the counts, barons, and citizens, who, within the confines of the principality, were ever seeking to secure a more and more complete independence, were to be held in subjection. They had also to reckon with the rivalry and ambition of two neighbours: the Dukes of Aquitaine, who, as we have seen, sought to lay hands upon the county of Toulouse, and the Counts of Barcelona, who, rulers of Roussillon and in theory vassals of the French crown, were ever ready to contend with the house of Saint-Gilles for the possession of the March of Gothia.