Henry the Liberal: Count of Champagne, 1127–1181, by Theodore Evergates

Over the course of a distinguished career, Theodore Evergates has published a series of influential works on the medieval county of Champagne—that is, the region to the immediate east of Paris and the Île de France, and which was centred upon Troyes. These include monographs (such as A Feudal Society: The Bailliage of Troyes under the Counts of Champagne, 1152–1284 [1971] and The Aristocracy in the County of Champagne, 1000–1300 [2007; rev ante, cxxiv (2009), 395–7]) and editions and translations of sources relating to the county’s history (including Feudal Society in Medieval France: Documents from the County of Champagne (1993) and Littere Baronum: The Earliest Cartulary of the Counts of Champagne [2003; rev ante, cxix (2004), 765–6]). This biography of Count Henry I ‘the Liberal’ (d. 1181) therefore extends Evergates’s already sizeable contribution to scholarship on medieval Champagne. In the preface to this book, Evergates sets out the scope of his enquiry by sketching the broad contours of Count Henry’s career. Henry was celebrated by his contemporaries for his generosity, a trait which earned him his epithet. He had a love of books and history, and, from his early years, he was schooled in the art of statecraft. As count of Champagne, Henry had dealings with the kings of France, England and Germany (and therefore the Western emperor), the emperor of Byzantium, the papacy, as well as some of the most influential ecclesiastical figures and intellectuals of his age, including Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Becket.

Over the course of this book, Evergates charts how Henry established himself in the territory he inherited from his father, the county of Champagne, and how he forged a capital for this new polity at Troyes, where he built a palace which incorporated an impressive chapel, that of St Étienne. To fuel the economic development required to fund these initiatives, Henry harnessed the proceeds of trade fairs. The chapters of the book are for the most part divided chronologically, and together they chart Count Henry’s life from birth to death. This approach permits Evergates to highlight the ways in which his subject changed over the course of his life: the count was not the same person in his youth as he was in his middle or later years. The book also features thematic sections; the fifth chapter, for example, explores Henry’s cultural interests. Despite Henry’s prominence in the second half of the twelfth century, he did not become the subject of a contemporary biography. As a result, the chief source material for Evergates’s study is a varied corpus of documentary material, and, above all, his 550 known acts. Perhaps the most impressive achievement of this book is the manner in which the author uses this diplomatic evidence to weave a coherent, convincing and detailed study of Henry’s life, political interactions, statecraft and world view. That he has succeeded in doing so is testament to his mastery of this Champenois material, and of his craftsmanship as a historian.

Evergates sets out and then develops several interlocking ideas about Count Henry’s career and his activities. A recurrent thread is the argument that Henry’s participation in the Second Crusade proved instrumental to the remainder of his career. The book demonstrates that after Henry returned to the West, his career was characterised by sustained interactions with figures with whom he had forged close and lasting friendships during the crusade. Chief among these veterans of the Second Crusade was Louis VII, king of France (1137–80). These ties, which bound together the ‘generation of “47” (p. 21, referring to 1147, the year in which the crusaders from France set out for the East), had a considerable bearing on Henry’s career and his efforts to establish and develop Champagne. Another theme of the book is Henry’s prominent place in the political community of twelfth-century France and the interconnectedness of that community. This study of Louis and Henry’s interactions shows king and count working together to achieve mutual aims, bound as they were by dynastic ties and their shared experiences on crusade. Above all, this book details Henry’s state-building activities in Champagne (especially at Troyes) and his intellectual pursuits, tracing his dealings with some of the most influential literati of the day. Perhaps most remarkably, warfare barely features at all in this book. While Henry did participate in military action, it was for the most part in service to the king, and took place elsewhere, beyond the borders of Champagne. If, as Thomas Bisson has written, there was a ‘Crisis of the Twelfth Century’, then it is not to be found in the county of Champagne. The closing chapter of the book explores Henry’s posthumous legacy and traces the development of the county of Champagne after his death. Subsequent counts had wider obligations, which took them for long periods away from the county. As a result, Troyes, and its chapel of St Étienne, Henry’s mausoleum, stood in the centuries down to the Revolution as a ‘time capsule from the twelfth century’ (p. 182). In crafting this fine study, Evergates has laid plain the achievements of Henry the Liberal, his efforts to forge his county of Champagne and his political activities in twelfth-century France and beyond.