Henry the Liberal: Count of Champagne, 1127–1181 by Theodore Evergates (review)

While travelling through Champagne in 1179, Walter Map – cleric, critic, and wit at the Plantagenet court – recorded his impressions of his host in Troyes, calling him ‘the most generous of men, so much so that to many he seemed prodigal, for to all who asked, he gave’ (p. 157). This was Henry ‘the Liberal’, Count of Champagne from 1152 to 1181. As Theodore Evergates notes, while this reputation was well deserved, it was not entirely altruistic. Henry’s largesse to monasteries, rural tenants, and urban centres stimulated production and commerce, notably through the important Champagne fairs, which generated considerable extra revenue for the Count through tolls and taxes. Henry’s ambition appears to have been to build a thriving, peaceful, and increasingly unified political entity from a collection of formerly separate feudal regions based on castles or other fortified sites. In this, as Evergates demonstrates, he succeeded.

Henry’s father, Thibaut, elder brother of King Stephen of England, had combined the family’s traditional estates in Blois–Chartres, to the west of Paris, with newly acquired lands further east. This created a powerful principality on either side of the royal domain, giving rise to tension with the Capetian monarch, Louis VI, and leading Thibaut to be described as ‘within France second only to the king’ (p. 3). Henry inherited only the eastern lands but he took to calling himself Count Palatine of Troyes to underscore his superior status based on a lordship extending over neighbouring regions. On this basis, Evergates claims persuasively that ‘[w]ithin a decade of his accession, Henry had reimagined Champagne as a territorial state’. Henry’s relations with Louis VII were generally much better than had been the case between their fathers. Ties of loyalty and mutual respect forged during the expedition to the Holy Land on the Second Crusade (1147–49) endured through subsequent decades. These were reinforced by marital pacts: Henry married Louis’s daughter Marie (from the king’s first marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine), while in 1160, Louis took as his third wife Henry’s sister, Adele, who became the mother of Philip Augustus. Despite the ensuing tangle of relationships which made Henry both son-in-law and brother-in-law to his sovereign and which were potentially in breach of canon law, family alliances underscored a soothing of political tensions.

Although the author includes a chapter on court culture in the midst of the dominant political narrative, surprisingly little space is given to several notable figures traditionally associated with Champagne and especially with the circle of Countess Marie. It is true that the idea of a literary court centred on Marie has little or no basis and has effectively been demolished, yet the possibility of connections with Chrétien de Troyes, in particular, is only briefly considered here and is just as quickly dismissed (p. 147). All the same, the cultural influence of new Cistercian foundations, the frequent presence of papal delegations and foreign merchants, and the personal interests of the Count contributed to an environment which encouraged intellectual enquiry and spread literacy and written materials more widely than was usual in the twelfth-century context, so that they became an ‘integral part of life in Champagne’ (p. 176).

Architecture, too, saw important developments, especially with the construction of a new comital residence and adjacent chapel of St-Étienne in Troyes, one of the first to be constructed in the new Gothic style. Though it cannot be proven that Henry stopped off in Sicily on his return from crusade, Evergates suggests that this is likely and argues that Henry may have taken the idea for a combined residential, administrative, and spiritual campus from the magnificent works being undertaken in mid-century by the Norman king Roger II at Palermo. The idea is a tantalising one, if difficult to verify.

Perhaps this account sounds a touch too idealised or...