Friendship, yep, and his martial skill (the Count's) is either 13 or 14, memory is a bit shoddy and I have to run out before I can check.
Thanks for the comment!
Thanks for the comment!
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Book One: An Occitan Kingdom
Chapter Eleven:
The Years 1083 to 1086,
Or How I Spent Those Years Pleasing Priests
1. The Count of Lusignan
Finding himself complacent with his recent gains, both material and immaterial, Count Bernard of Armagnac began to change his forceful ways. Between the years 1083 and 1085 the count seemed to undergo a maturing period, rescinding many of his nefarious plots against those who slighted him in favor of tactful and diplomatic interactions. Later in the summer of 1085 the count even expanded his circle of friends to include Count Bernat of Angouleme whom he met through his close friend the Count of Limousine. Interactions with his own subjects, however, saw little change and the count still refused the demands of the nobles of his realm- even going so far as to denouncing the requests of Bourbon gentry to hunt on church lands as heretical.
However, as complacent as he was, Bernard could not commit himself to idleness. Given his constant aversion to any idea of a foreign crusade and the clergy of his realm taking him for some sort of pious figure, Bernard found himself constantly at ends with the keener Frankish theologians who saw past his empty provocations against the enemies of the church. Not all that desperate to please them, but more so to silence the priests and bishops the count declared a miniature crusade of sorts on the excommunicated Count Hughes of Lusignan in early March of 1086- charging the independent count with not only defecting from his righteous and holy liege, King Philippe, but also for harboring all manners of black magicians in his court. Virtually any nobleman or woman who had any inkling of sense knew Bernard’s ‘Crusade’ to be one called out of hubris in place of piety, but none rallied to the cause of the excommunicated Count Hughes for fear of Papal reproach.
By the second week of March Marshal Pons had gathered together 704 men from bourbon consisting mostly of young noble-born knights seeking coin in some manner and peasants forced from their fields. Soon thereafter he marched the host west to Lusignan, encountering little resistance much to Marshal Pons’s surprise and the dismay of the would-be glory seekers. Weeks before Marshal Pons had crossed into Lusignan Count Bernard’s aunt and liege, Duchess Anges, had gathered together nearly 1,500 men in show of support for his nephew’s ‘crusade’. Whatever semblance of a defence Count Hughes had managed to muster was easily swept aside by the Occitan horde led by the Duchess’s marshal, Guigues d’Albret, and Marshal Pons arrived at Marshal Guigues’s camp as the duchy’s army was preparing to siege Lusignan’s small castle.
Mid April saw the count leading nearly 1,000 men from Armagnac well after any chance of battle had passed and the host joined with the 2,204 men besieging Lusignan later that month. Lusignan’s defenders found themselves faced with an army nearly three times the size of their own and so they cowered behind their castle walls for months on end, never daring to make an attack on the superior force. Finally in August their will broke and the gates were opened to the Duchess- Count Hughes had killed himself the night before fearing the punishment awaiting him at the hands of his pious enemies- and Marshal Guigues managed to wrest control of the county from Hughes’s son and heir, placing the land in the hands of Count Bernard.
2. A New King
Elsewhere in the kingdom of France, King Philippe was drawing near to the end of his days. During a skirmish between a group of knights from the rebel county of Bourges the king was struck in the side with a lance and despite killing the knight Philippe would suffer greatly from the wound.
Almost a month later the king still was bed ridden while his son and heir, Prince Roger, swept across the county with his men. As the prince laid siege in early June of 1086 he received word that his father had died, making Roger the King of France.
King Roger the Great
3. Pope Urban II and the Muslims in Spain
Europe had yet to see the end of the death of its important figures: on the 14th of October in the year 1086 Pope Victor III fell down a flight of stairs after stepping on his gown, breaking his neck and leaving Christendom without a holy father. Worse timing could not be had for the demise of Pope Victor the III, who was supposedly undergoing the motions to rekindle interest in the crusade on Jerusalem. When Bishop Odo of Lagery succeeded Victor his subjects expected for him to call for the reclamation of the holy land and braced themselves for further inaction, but Odo proved to be the first wise pope in decades.
Soon after styling himself as Urban II, he called upon his ties in France to endorse a new foray into Muslim lands. Pope Urban II beseeched King Roger to spearhead a venture into Spain, as Burgos had fallen years before and with it the last Christian rulers in the Iberian Peninsula. Roger, resting on his laurels after successfully sequestering the rebel Count of Bourges, told Pope Urban that he would be more than glad to expand Christianity- and more importantly his realm- into Spain, thus beginning a new period in French history.
Spain c.1086
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A very humourous and well crafted AAR. Enjoying reading it
Thank you for reading it and commenting!
Why does everyone always want to conquer Iberia from musulmans?
Dunno, but I am not going to complain as it works out to the benefit of the Count's dynasty.