Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/99



HE lecture upon Normandy and England sought to place in their Norman perspective the events leading to the Norman Conquest and to show how that decisive triumph of Norman strength and daring was made possible by the development of an exceptional ducal authority in Normandy and Maine and by the personal greatness of William the Conqueror. We now come to follow still further this process of expansion, to the Scotch border, to Ireland, to the Pyrenees, until the empire of the Plantagenet kings became the chief political fact in western Europe. The Norman empire is the outstanding feature of the twelfth century, as the conquest of England was of the eleventh.

This great imperial state is commonly known, not as the Norman, but as the Angevin, empire, because its rulers, Henry II, Richard, and John, were descended in the male line from the counts of Anjou. The phrase is, however, a misnomer, since it leads one to suppose that the Angevin counts were its creators, which is in no sense the case. The centre of the empire was Normandy, its founders were the Norman dukes. The marriage of the Princess Matilda to Count Geoffrey Plantagenet added