More from my big fat Norman campaign.
It's the year 1056 - two years after the end of the 50-year reign of Arnaud the Wise, the grandson of King Gerard of Valland and the son of King Joscelin III. Arnaud seemed destined for trouble when he inherited the throne in 1004 at age 12 after Joscelin III died in his 40s, a victim of his unhealthy lifestyle. With his regent struggling to hold the vast royal demesne and his sister the heir apparent, the nobles of Francia conspired en masse to overthrow Arnaud in favour of the Duke of Luxembourg, even with his vast treasury flung open to treat his vassals with liberal gifts. Only the permanent stationing of the Great Company in Brugge, alongside the retinue of Valland, kept the nobility from taking matters into their own hands.
When Arnaud came of age, he found himself the beneficiary of his father and grandfather's liberal dalliances in the game of inheritance. With Western Europe in chaos as the Wiglafing realms of Aquitaine, Burgundy and Germany competed for dominance and the British Isles torn apart by conflict between the Anglo-Saxons of Asturias and the various petty kingdoms neighbouring them, succession struggles abounded, just as a generation of distant kin of the House of Écarve came of age with fringe claims to be pushed. Over the course of two decades, Arnaud pursued his relatives' claims vigorously. Norman knights marched into Aquitaine to wrest Alsace and Toulouse from the hands of the Wiglafings, into Gascogne to seize that kingdom from a rebellious duke, then into the duchies of Burgundy, Provence, East Anglia and Northumbria, and finally supporting a kinsman's claim to the crown of Gallaecia, pressing claims for members of the family. In between these conquests, he answered the call of Rome to war in Pannonia, leading the charge to wrest the Carpathian Mountains from the hand of the Abauj Khanate and return it to the hands of the Bohemian kings of Pannonia.
By 1024, Arnaud's campaign in the south had progressed sufficiently that, in a grand ceremony in Sluys in the presence of a papal legate, he declared himself Emperor of Gallia and protector of the Saxon March - notably, not Emperor of Francia, for that title was seen as tied to the Frankish people and the descendants of Merovech and Charles, and the men who came from the north to Valland years before had come to view themselves as distinct from the Franks, who had by now long since been shoved into Italy. The name "Francia" thus came to sit in the same category as "Visigothic Kingdom" - a transient title tied to a tribal identity, applied more to Italy these days than to Norman Gaul.
Over thirty years as Emperor, Arnaud warred with the Franks of Italy, who had expanded to conquer most of Ifriqiya, Bohemia and Bavaria. Seeking to break up the Agilolfing family's dominance of the Mediterranean and central Europe, Arnaud supported a claimant to the throne of Italy, breaking that kingdom out from the united kingship. The candidate the Normans installed was overthrown within a year, but the move did successfully prevent the Agilolfings from re-consolidating their crowns under one holder again. A series of wars in Burgundy followed as Arnaud expanded to most of the old Gallo-Roman borders.
In his late 50s but still hale, Arnaud had time - in 1051 - to sail to the Levant with 60,000 men at arms to answer the call of the Second Crusade. With shockingly little effort, Gallic troops seized much of the Holy Land from the Taid Emirate, establishing a Norman foothold in the fractured Middle East. Arnaud wrested the lands around Ascalon from the Farukid Caliphate a year or two later before finally passing in his early 60s and leaving it to his 14-year-old grandson, Arnaud II - his own son having died of cancer at age 30.