Charles the Good, count of Flanders, was murdered in 1127. The details of the plot, the murder, and the consequences are told in several contemporary accounts. The events reveal much about twelfth-century attitudes and social expectations, starting with the fact that the complicated alliances, betrayals, and plots seen in Game of Throne are mild compared to the real Middle Ages.
To start, Charles was only half Flemish (we would say Belgian, except that Belgium only became a country in the nineteenth century) and half Danish. Members of great noble and royal families married members of similarly powerful families, meaning that in the twelfth century family ties stretched across all of Europe, even into Russia.
Charles was the son of Cnut, king of Denmark, and of the daughter of Count Robert I of Flanders. The name Charles was certainly chosen to evoke Charlemagne, emperor three centuries earlier and still alive in epic and story. The counts of Flanders actually were descended from Charlemagne, as they were very proud to tell anyone who would listen, and in naming his son Charles, King Cnut may have been hoping to gain some imperial cachet for Denmark. His assassination ended that hope, however.
Although born in Denmark, Charles went with his mother back to Flanders after his father was assassinated. Noble widows at the time usually left their children with their dead husband's family if they left, but Charles's mother may have feared Cnut's assassins might be coming for her son (she did leave her daughters in Denmark). He was a toddler at the time, so he probably grew up with few memories of his native country.
His mother settled back in Flanders with her father (Count Robert) and brothers but soon left again, this time to marry the count of Apulia (southern Italy), leaving her son behind this time. Charles was principally raised by his grandfather, Count Robert, and by his uncle (Robert's successor), also named Robert. After Robert II's death, his son Baldwin succeeded as count of Flanders, and Charles acted as chief advisor for his cousin. (Keeping up so far?)
So far everything looks fine, other than nothing matching our idea of a child being raised by a loving two-parent family. And when Count Baldwin died in 1119, after only a short reign as count, he designated Charles as his successor. But now the plotting and betrayals begin. Robert II's widow, Clementia, daughter of the count of Burgundy, wanted a different cousin to succeed, the son of a younger brother of Robert II. (Thus Burgundy and its alliances enter the picture, and I'm simplifying a lot.) Everybody went to war with everybody.
But Charles eventually prevailed and settled down to try to be a just count, trying to find food for his subjects during a famine, seeking to pass fair judgments in legal cases. He also proved himself a generous patron of the church. When he was murdered, it was not by all his relatives and in-laws, but by his serfs.
In this period, the first quarter of the twelfth century, serfdom was rapidly disappearing in western Europe, as peasants asserted their freedom. Erembald, who led the conspiracy against Charles, was said by contemporaries to have been born a serf but to be trying to hide his origins, and he decided it was better to kill Charles than to have the count reveal his true status. This sounds rather implausible, but that contemporaries would say it is an indication of how sensitive an issue servile status was at the time.
Charles was murdered in church, something contemporaries stressed as making an evil deed even worse. In fact, one chronicler said he was simultaneously praying, singing psalms, and distributing pennies to the poor when he was stabbed. (Quite the multi-tasker.) Such a description made Charles's death a virtual martyrdom; someone would have to be killed for one's faith to be an actual martyr, but the chronicler seemed to think this was close enough.
The murder was considered terrible and shocking, sending shock waves throughout Europe. The Scandinavian royal families had been trying to kill each other off for generations, but further south aristocrats liked to believe they lived in modern, peaceful times, when noble violence was restricted to killing Muslims in the Holy Land (it wasn't).
Charles never became a saint, in spite of being killed in a church and designated "the Good." Without an heir, he left Flanders in turmoil. First of course the murderers had to be caught and hung. Then a successor had to be found. King Louis VI of France decided he should make the decision as to who succeeded, as Flanders was considered part of the French kingdom. He settled on William Clito, grandson of William the Conqueror of England, whose wife had been a sister of Robert I of Flanders. But William Clito had little support, and the county was taken within a year by Thierry of Alsace, whose mother was a sister of Robert II of Flanders.
Can't ignore the role of women in medieval inheritance.
The principal scholar now working on Charles the Good is Jeff Rider of Wesleyan University.
© C. Dale Brittain 2014
For more on medieval families, nobles, and inheritance, see my ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback.
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