Fulk III, Count of Anjou

Fulk III, Count of Anjou
Seal of Fulk III
Spouse(s)	Elisabeth of Vendôme Hildegarde of Sundgau
Noble family	House of Ingelger
Father	Geoffrey I, Count of Anjou
Mother	Adelaide of Vermandois
Born	970
Died	21 June 1040(1040-06-21) Metz

Fulk III, the Black (970–1040; Old French: Foulque Nerra) was an early Count of Anjou celebrated as one of the first great builders of medieval castles. He constructed an estimated 100 of them, along with abbeys, across the Loire Valley in what is now France. He fought successive wars with neighbors in Brittany, Blois, Poitou and Aquitaine and traveled four times to Jerusalem on pilgrimage during the course of his life. He had two wives and three children.

Fulk was a natural horseman and a fearsome warrior, with a keen sense of military strategy that saw him get the better of most of his opponents. He was allied with the goals and aims of the Capetians against the dissipated Carolingians of his era. With his county seat at Angers, Fulk’s bitter enemy was Eudes II of Blois, his neighbor 128 km east along the Loire River, at Tours. The two men traded towns, followers and insults throughout their lives.

Fulk finished his first castle at Langeais, 104 km east of Angers, on the banks of the Loire, in 994. Like many of his constructions, it began as a wooden tower, and was eventually replaced with a stone structure, fortified with exterior walls, and equipped with a thick-walled tower called a donjon in French (source of the English dungeon, which however implies a cellar, rather than a tower). He built it in the territory of Eudes I, Count of Blois, and they fought a battle over it in 994. But Eudes I died of a sudden illness, and his son and successor, Eudes II, did not manage to evict him.

Fulk continued building more towers in a slow encirclement of Tours: Montbazon, Montrésor, Mirebeau, Montrichard, Loches, and even the tower of Montboyau, erected just across the Loire from Tours in 1016. He also fortified the castles at Angers, Amboise, Chateau-Gontier, Chinon, Mayenne and Semblançay, among many others. “The construction of castles for the purpose of extending a ruler’s power was part of Fulk Nerra’s strategy,” wrote Peter Fraser Purton, in A History of Medieval Siege, c. 450–1220.