Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/75

Rh of the feudal baron, and it extended wherever it was not restricted by the bonds of fealty and vassalage. The duke of Normandy and the count of Anjou were both vassals of the king of France, but their relations to each other were those of complete independence, and, save for some special agreement or friendship, were normally relations of hostility. And so an important part of Norman history has to treat of the struggles with the duchy's neighbors, Flanders on the north, the royal domain on the east, Maine and Anjou to the southward, and Brittany on the west. Fortunately for Normandy, the Bretons were but loosely organized, while the Flemings, compacted into one of the strongest of the French fiefs, were generally friendly, and the friendship was in this period cemented by William's marriage to Matilda, daughter of the count of Flanders, one of the few princely marriages of the time which was founded upon affection and observed with fidelity. With Anjou the case was different. Beginning as a border county over against the Bretons of the lower Loire, with the black rock of Angers as its centre and fortress, Anjou, though still comparatively small in area, had grown into one of the strongest states of western France. Under a remarkable line of counts, Geoffrey Greygown, Fulk the Red, and Fulk the Black, ancestors of the Plantagenet kings of England, it had become the dominant power on the Loire, and now under their successor Geoffrey the Hammer it threatened