Ripples: The Makings of a Bad Situation
We have left England in a state of relative peace, and Norway in a state of being ravaged by Danish conquest. The rest of the world was, obviously, going to be affected to a greater or a lesser extent, according to distance and interactions.
Willelme, Normandy's duke and king-wannabe, was dead. His half brother, Eudes, still alive, and and Robert was still a little young for the title of duke and a little impudent as well. Eudes had no intention of taking the duchy for himself, but he did have every intention of exerting total control over the boy and ruling from behind the scenes himself, distrusting his Flemish mother and her ambitious family. If that meant beating him into submission if the occasion called for it – fine. If that meant terrorizing his mother – fine.
After the death of his father, young Robert's childhood went from picturesque to a boy's worst nightmare. At first, with the world seemingly mounted on his shoulders, Robert took his uncle's advice gladly, but he soon began to dislike the dismissal with which he was treating his mother, and soon found himself as Eudes' personal punching bag within the first year of his rulership. Despite being quite the young athlete, he always seemed to lose when the not-so-celebate and manipulating Bishop of Bayeux came after him.
Robert was lazy in his early teens, and spoiled, and a bad politician. What 12 year old IS a good politician? His father had granted him the sizable County of Maine because he had been unsatisfied with the authority allotted him, and that county was ready to revolt when the Norman nobles arrived back in defeat. But his spoiled, haughty, and rambunctious character changed very quickly when his uncle returned to rule as regent. He became shy, reclusive, and very depressed. The death of his father had a very big emotional impact on him, and when he confided in food his uncle told him he was getting fat, and restricted his meals – Robert subsequently started eating considerably less and engaging in absurd amounts of physical exercise to compensate, and got really skinny, really fast. He was definitely chiseled – one historian would later comment that he was strong, and his body looked like ropes wrapped around bone, but he was THIN, and the body image problems he would develop lasted for the rest of his short life.
Normandy's most immediate and pressing threat was the loss of the valuable and LARGE County of Maine. Maine had, in the past, been highly contested territory. To secure Maine, Robert needed to marry his betrothed Marguerite, the sister of the dead Count Herbert II immediately, and marry her he did almost the moment the Normans got home. The couple was very, very young – Robert was barely able to make children, and he didn't like his adult bride, but his uncle didn't care, and neither did anyone else save his mother, who Eudes scolded for making her son “soft”. In 1066, Robert married Marguerite, and was expected to produce a royal heir on the spot if Normandy was going to hold onto Maine. When scolded about how he needed to perform, Robert didn't understand the sense of urgency that his uncle was feeling. After all, Angieus (Anjou) was under the lordship of the blatantly incompetent Geoffrey III le Barbu de Wastinens (Gâtinais) who had allowed the formerly powerful Angieus to be raided by Bretons and his vassals to walk all over him... how could the Angevins present that much of a threat? His lack of understanding earned him a good beating from his uncle. What Robert didn't see, to Eudes' dismay, was that Fulco le Réchin, Geoffrey's brother, was brooding in the background, about to explode with disgust at his brother's inability to maintain control over the county. A regime change was about to take place in Angieus, and Eudes could see that, and he wanted to make sure that the Normans had as tight a grip over Maine as they could get.
But it wasn't just Robert's life he was playing like a harp, but also Robert's siblings. He plotted to marry a 10 year old Cecilia to Alan of Brittany, the son of Duchess Hawiz and by extension nephew to Konan II, with whose duchy her father had actively sought to undermine. However Hawiz, quite out of control of her lands and her vassals was in no position to refuse an alliance with Normandy, especially given the nature of the engagement, i.e. her son and Willelme's daughter. She didn't like it of course, and neither did her husband, but oh fucking well, right?
Cecilia was not the only one of her father's children whose sexuality was for sale though. Richard, approaching sexual maturity, was a prime candidate for betrothal, and who was available for betrothal but the 14 year old daughter of Guilhèm VII d'Aquitània? Another two or three years, and the two would be able to marry and have children, right? Well... if the most powerful man in all of France was interested in treating with the Normans, that was. For now, Eudes was willing to settle with a betrothal of 10 year old Willelme junior to the 4 year old daughter of the Count of Vermand (Vermandois), Adelaide and call it a year.