saw the extension of the Anglo-Norman lands to a still greater degree with the marriage of Henry's daughter to Count Geoffrey of Anjou, the eventual succession of their son to the English throne as Henry II and also to Normandy, Maine, and Anjou, and the acquisition of Poitou and Aquitaine as well by marriage to its heiress, Eleanor, who had just been divorced by King Louis VII of France. In the course of these developments Louis had been able to receive homage for all of the continental lands but it was an open question whether he and his successors would continue to be able to do so.

In some ways the history of France is that of Germany in reverse. Its period of greatest turmoil came first, and it was not forged into a unity until the thirteenth century when the circumstances were more propitious and the conflicts of earlier days played out. It was not tempted by the opportunities on its borders or forced by the threats beyond them into a premature unity. When that unity was achieved it was willingly accepted and consciously manufactured and therefore endured. Little of this could be seen at the time; the fall of the Angevin lands was to come swiftly and unexpectedly, the sudden and vast extension of the French crown coming as a great windfall rather than something long and consciously striven for. Yet arguably it would never have happened at all had the French monarchy not decayed almost to vanishing point for much of this period.

That decay came first from the struggle between the Carolingians and Robertians for the crown through much of the tenth century, and then from the exceptional stability which the Capetian dynasty enjoyed after its accession in 987 to what became an uninterrupted and unchallenged possession of the crown. The conflict was the more obvious factor. The election of Count Odo of Paris to the crown after Charles the Fat's abdication in 887 had not resulted in permanent change of dynasty. Before Odo died he had been obliged to recognize the succession of Charles the Simple. His election, nevertheless, served as a potent example to his descendants who took advantage of Charles the Simple's incapacity to secure the succession first of Odo's son Robert in 922 and

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