Blessed Charles the Good

Charles first took up arms under his uncle Robert of Jerusalem, whom he accompanied to t he Holy Land Terre Sainte Region visited during their only excursion from seclusion. : it was a worthy beginning to his career.

After having taken part for several years in the heroic toils of the Crusaders, he returned to Europe covered in noble scars.

Baldwin of the Axe, Baudouin à la Hache Count of Flanders who designated Charles as his successor. who succeeded Robert of Jerusalem in 1111 as Count of Flanders, having no children, turned his sights toward his first cousin, Charles, to one day institute him as the heir to his county. He first gave him the land of Ancre, the same that Louis XIII gave in 1620 to Albert de Luynes: this is why Charles the Good is sometimes referred to by the name Charles of Ancre.

To recognize his services even further, Baldwin of the Axe had him marry Marguerite, daughter of Renaud, Count of Clermont, who brought him the County of Amiens as a dowry. He even entrusted him with the administration of his states; so that the people, accustomed to the gentleness and equity of our Saint, received him at his accession as their father and protector. But this public joy was troubled by Countess Clemence, mother of the late Count Baldwin: this princess, to place upon the head of William of Ypres, to whom she had married her niece, the crown of our Saint, formed a league against him which included Godfrey the Bearded, Count of Louvain and Duke of Brabant and Lower Lorraine; Hugh of Camp-d'Avène, Count of Saint-Pol, and Baldwin III, Count of Hainaut. They declared war on Charles. The latter had God on his side; who can be defeated with such an auxiliary? The Count of Flanders struck down his enemies and dictated the law to them; he reduced to the same impotence the counts Walter of Hesdin and Thomas of Coucy, who attempted to disturb the peace of his subjects; so that as much as he made himself lovable to the latter, he became formidable to foreigners.

When the Emperor Charles V invaded Champagne in 1123, Charles the Good, in his capacity as Count of Amiens and vassal of the King of France, rushed to his aid followed by ten thousand soldiers. The Emperor, frightened by a prodigious armament where Picardy, Champagne, and the Île-de-France had provided two hundred thousand men, did not dare to engage in battle: the war thus ended before it had begun.

Delivered from the wars that had saddened the beginning of his reign, Charles devoted himself entirely to making peace and justice flourish in his states. After declaring the Truce of God, he proscribed the habit his subjects had of being constantly armed, which encouraged brawls in a country where people were so strongly enamored of independence and liberty.

It was by his example, even more than by his ordinances, that he strove to civilize the people he governed. Simple and modest in his demeanor, he detested flattery. His austerities equaled those of the religious. An enemy of ostentation, he reduced his expenses to lower the taxes of the people and decrease the dues of his farmers. Full of solicitude for the needs of the poor, he went so far as to strip himself of his own clothes to clothe them. He remained barefoot, out of devotion, when he performed his daily acts of charity, and kissed the hands of every poor person he helped.

A chronicle of Flanders reports a trait of kindness that recalls an episode from the life of Fénelon. One day, while Charles was attending Vespers at Saint-Pierre in Ghent, a poor woman came to express her sorrow at having had a cow taken from her by a soldier. The count asked her to wait at the door so that he could render her justice after Vespers; the poor woman having observed that he would then be occupied with more serious matters and would forget her humble plea, the count gave her his cloak as a pledge of his promise. When Charles left the church, his officers wanted to speak to him immediately about various important matters; but he declared that he would answer no one until a cow that had been stolen from a poor woman had been returned to her. The animal was finally found, and everyone blessed the prince's kindness.

Charles always showed himself full of respect and consideration for the secular priests and the religious, whose advice he sought and received with the most sincere humility; he thanked them when they pointed out faults for him to correct, and rewarded them with very special protection. He wanted the affairs of the religious to be dispatched before all others, so that they would not lose their time in audiences and would be absent from their monastery for as little time as possible. Iperius tells the following anecdote on this subject: John, Abbot of Saint-Bertin, having presented himself at the court of Bruges on the day of the Epiphany to complain about a knight who wanted to seize land belonging to his abbey for sixty years, the count said to him: "Lord Abbot, who is singing High Mass in your monastery today?" — "Count, there are a hundred monks among whom one can choose an officiant." — "But you should, on such a day, share the offices and meals with your monks, and provide them with the legitimate rejoicings for which my ancestors assigned you revenues." — "It is necessity that compelled me to leave my brothers, to come and warn you that one of your lords is oppressing us." — "It would have sufficed to warn me by a message: for your duty is to pray to God, as mine is to protect you." — Then he had the delinquent brought in and said to him: "If I ever hear complaints about you again, I will have you thrown into a cauldron of boiling water." The knight took heed, and the reassured abbot hastened to return to his monastery.

In all circumstances, Charles's conduct was dictated by a deep love of justice and by a special predilection for the weak and the oppressed; when he was reproached for his sympathies, he replied: "It is because I know how many needs the poor have and how much pride the rich have."

We complete this portrait of the character and virtues of the Count of Flanders by letting the naive chronicle of Oudegherst speak: one will find there some indications that are not met with in the other biographers of Charles the Good: "He had three religious, doctors of theology, who, daily after supper, proposed and explained a chapter or two of the Bible to him, in which he took singular pleasure. He made everyone swear, on pain of losing a limb, not to swear by the name of God, nor by anything that touched upon God and his saints, and when anyone of his household was found in this fault, he made him, besides this, fast forty days on bread and water... he ordered that all those condemned to the ultimate punishment be confessed and that, one day before the execution, they be administered the Holy Sacrament, which before was not customary to observe. He was wonderfully severe and rigorous against witches, enchanters, necromancers, and others who helped themselves with such arts... He usually had, at dinner, in his hall, thirteen poor people, whom he had served the same as his knights and lords... He ordered that no one should lodge boys or vagabonds, on pain of restoring the damages and interests they might have caused to others; that no one, of whatever quality or condition he might be, should have the boldness to take away or have children taken away without the consent of the father, mother, tutors, or other relatives... He was a wonderfully good dispenser of justice, so that he constrained those who were accustomed to oppressing the poor people to desist from it, against whom he used such rigor that the poor people lived in good peace and tranquility."

This tranquility was to be disturbed by a terrib le famine which terrible famine Major food crisis during which Charles demonstrated his charity. , in 1125, devastated mainly Flanders and Picardy. From the previous year, superstitious populations expected a grave event, because, on the 11th of August, a partial solar eclipse had darkened the skies. The winter that followed was so harsh and so long that the seeds did not sprout. Then broke out one of those disastrous famines that decimated the populations of the Middle Ages.

Some died for lack of food; others threw themselves greedily upon the foodstuffs that chance provided them and caused themselves fatal indigestion. Bread was completely lacking: thus the inhabitants of Bruges, of Ghent, and of the banks of the Lys and the Scheldt were reduced to eating only meat, even during Lent. The villagers hoped in vain to obtain bread in the towns and castles; they found only death at the end of their wanderings. Those who survived were so emaciated that one would have taken them for walking skeletons.

This public disaster gave the blessed Charles the opportunity to display all the activity of his solicitude and charity. Every day, he fed one hundred poor people in Bruges, and orders were given for the same to be done in each of his castles. It is said that while in Ypres, he distributed at one time seven thousand eight hundred two-pound loaves of bread. Every day also he completely clothed five poor people, giving each one a shirt, a tunic, furs, a cape, boots, booties, and shoes. After this generous distribution, he would go to hear Mass at the church, sing psalms there, and finish his devotions by distributing coins to the beggars.

He devoted the rest of his day to making regulations that could soften the present evils and prevent their return. He reprimanded the inhabitants of Ghent who had let starving people die before their doors; he forbade the brewing of beer, so as not to exhaust the little grain that had been harvested; he prescribed that bakers knead oat bread and fixed the price of a quarter of wine at six ecus. By his orders, all dogs were killed, and the lands were sown in the proportion of two-thirds wheat and one-third beans or peas, vegetables that grow quickly and whose prompt harvest could shorten the time of the famine. Certain wealthy families, among others that of Bertulf, add certain Flemish chroniclers, hoarded wheat and sold it at an exorbitant price: Charles is said to have then charged his chaplain Tancmar to compel all owners to sell their wheat at a reasonable price; this would be one of the causes that led to the bloody drama whose horrors we will soon recount.

Thanks to these wise provisio ns, the Tancmar Chaplain to the count and rival of the Erembald family. hoarding ceased, currency circulated, and the shortage made its ravages felt less, while waiting for it to disappear with the next harvest.

Henry V, Emperor of the Romans, had just died without an heir (1125). The electors turned their attention to the prince who, in these times of famine and anarchy, had shown for his people that boundless devotion which is the most popular virtue of kings. The chancellor of the Bishop of Cologne and Count Godfrey of Namur were tasked with sounding out the intentions of Charles, who immediately sought the counsel of the barons of Flanders; some, the very ones who had long sworn his ruin, urged him to accept the imperial scepter, in order to rid themselves of a prince whose virtues were a burden to them; the others, and they were the greater number, begged him not to abandon the work he had begun, and not to deprive Flanders of a true father. The Blessed Charles the Good followed their advice and refused the glorious title of King of the Romans.

Shortly thereafter, he received a letter from the Crusader princes of Jerusalem offering him the throne of the Holy City, because Baldwin, King of Jerusalem, had been taken prisoner by the Turks. Charles likewise declined this honor, declaring that he wished to devote himself entirely to the happiness of Flanders.

He took advantage of the years of peace and abundance to fill reserve granaries and prevent the return of famines. He also wanted to strengthen the feudal regime, which was far from being as firmly established as in France; for the burghers proclaimed themselves the equals of the nobles, and many serfs had emancipated themselves.

Among the latter were the members of a family to which various Flemish chroniclers have wrongly given the name Van der Straten, instead of Erembald. Two brothers had long since forgotten the serfdom of their ancestors: one, Bertulf, had usurped the provostship of the C Bertulphe Provost of Saint-Donatian and head of the Erembald family, instigator of the conspiracy. hapter of Saint-Donatian of Bruges, to which was attached the dignity of hereditary chancellor of Flanders; the other, Desiderius Haket, was castellan of Bruges and had a son, named Burchard, who was distinguished by his turbulence and ambition.

The head of the Erembald family, Bertulf, was animated by an intolerable pride and affected to ignore the names of people he believed to be below him. He dominated the Chapter so much that none of the canons dared to complain of his misdeeds. He had made his nephews embrace the career of arms and incited them to take part in all those neighborhood quarrels that were so common in the 12th-century Flanders.

The provost of Bruges, who by his wealth and influence held the first rank after the Count of Flanders, had married his nieces to nobles, hoping thus to one day bring his family out of their servile condition. One of them, Robert, having challenged another knight to a judicial duel, pays for the murder of Charles the Good, and this sentiment has been followed by our modern historians Sismondi, Anquetil, Ségur, Lavallée, H. Martin. This anecdote is questionable, as we find no trace of it in contemporary authors.

the latter reminded him that, according to the law re-established by Charles, any free man who married a serf woman shared, one year after his marriage, the same condition as his wife, and that, consequently, he, a knight, could not accept a single combat that would not take place between peers. The provost was very mortified to see this condition of servility, which was unknown to most, thus revealed to the public, and he denied the count's property rights: "This Charles of Denmark," he exclaimed, "would never have attained the dignity of count if I had not wished it, and now he forgets the good I have done him; he inquires among the elders if I am a serf and wants to reduce me to slavery with my whole family: but what does it matter! We will always be free, and there is no one in the world who can make us serfs."

The conflict was referred to the judgment of the Count of Flanders. The provost appeared before him, at Cassel, accompanied by his son-in-law Robert and five hundred knights who seemed to have more confidence in their swords than in the justice of their cause. The blessed Charles, out of prudence, postponed the matter and demanded that, according to the law, twelve witnesses affirm by oath that Bertulf's niece was not of servile origin. The chapter of the nobility was later convened at Saint-Omer, and, in the absence of the vainly requested testimonies, it was ruled that Robert of Kaeskerke was in the wrong and that the Erembald family consisted only of bondmen who belonged to the count's domain. Robert, who had himself been misled because, like many others, he thought that Bertulf's family had been emancipated, became one of the provost's most bitter enemies.

Another incident further poisoned the provost's animosity against Charles. The members of Bertulf's family could not forgive Tancmar, the count's chaplain and head of the Van der Straten family, for having had their grain, hoarded during the famine, sold. They tried to avenge themselves through violence. Thus, they took advantage of a trip Charles was making to France to ravage the domain of Bourbourg where Tancmar had fortified himself. When Charles returned to Ypres, the villagers came to complain that looters had ransomed them. The Count of Flanders, after taking the advice of his counselors, had the house of Burchard, who had been the principal instigator of the disorders, burned down.

The provost, who affected to have remained a stranger to this affair, sent Guy of Steenvoorde and other negotiators to the count, under the pretext of obtaining mercy for his nephews. Charles showed himself indulgent, promised to give another house to Burchard, but forbade him to rebuild the ruins of the one that had been burned, because its proximity to Tancmar's could lead to new conflicts. Charles dismissed the envoys by having them drink the wine of departure.

Guy of Steenvoorde immediately went to find the Erembald family, who were gathered with their main supporters at Bertulf's house. Faithful to the lesson he had been given in advance by the provost, he recounted that the count was furious and that no mercy should be expected from him.

Then the conspirators joined hands in sign of alliance. Only one nephew of the provost, named Robert, opposed the pact of treason they wanted to hatch, and his silence could only be bought by persuading him that it was only a joke.

When evening came, the conspirators gathered in the house of a knight named Walter and spent the night planning the execution of their attack, which they set for the next morning, March 2, 1127.

The count's palace was contiguous to the church of Saint-Donatian and communicated via a vaulted corridor to one of the upper galleries: there was a chapel where the count came to hear Mass every morning. That day, Charles had risen very early, and having distributed his usual alms to the poor, had gone to the chapel, accompanied by his seneschal, his chamberlain, and a few other figures from his court. He had spent a very restless night. He had often been warned of the dangers that threatened him, but he had always replied: "We are constantly surrounded by perils; to be reassured, it is enough that we have the happiness of belonging to God. If, moreover, it is His will that we lose our lives, could we lose them for a better cause than that of justice and truth?" Burchard, alerted by his henchmen, rushed into the gallery with his accomp lices wh Burchard Bishop of Würzburg who transferred the relics in the following century. o were hiding their swords under their cloaks. They saw Charles kneeling on a prie-dieu, reading the penitential psalms aloud and distributing coins to the poor. The conspirators split into two groups to guard the two exits and let no one escape. Burchard, advancing slowly toward the count, pricked his neck slightly with the tip of his sword; at that moment, a poor woman cried out in alarm: "Lord Count, beware!" The prince had raised his head; Burchard crushed his skull with his sword, and his brains spilled onto the flagstones. The other assassins finished him off and cut off his right arm. The murderers sacrificed to their vengeance, in the church, in the city of Bruges, and in the castle, all those they considered to be opponents of the provost and friends of the count. The family of Tanckmar did not escape this horrible butchery.

"An astonishing thing!" says the chronicler Galbert, "the count having been killed on Wednesday morning, the rumor of this abominable death struck the ears of the citizens of the city of London the following Friday, around the first hour of the day; and, toward evening, this news went to cast consternation in the city of Laon which, located in France, is at a very considerable distance from Bruges. This is what we learned from our students who were then studying in Laon and from our merchants who, on the same day, were trading in London. No one, neither on horseback nor by sea, could have crossed so promptly the interval of time and space of which we have just spoken."

However, the body of Charles had been lying for a long time in the choir of the church of Saint-Donatien, and no one dared to pay him the duties of burial. The provost feigned to allow his funeral to proceed; but he secretly asked the abbot of Saint-Pierre of Ghent to have the body removed and buried in that city. In the meantime, he sent to ask Simon, bishop of Noyon, to come and reconcile the church, defiled by a murder of which he proclaimed himself innocent. But the messenger, thrown from his horse, could not reach Noyon. A few days later, the bishop of that city learned of the murder of his brother-in-law Charles the Good, and pronounced anathema against all those who had accomplished or favored it.

The abbot of Saint-Pierre of Ghent, to fulfill the desire of the provost, wanted to remove the body of Charles in a coffin; but the poor, the canons, and many citizens opposed it; they went to find Bertulf, to whom an old man said: "Lord provost, if you had wanted to act with justice, you would not have given, without the consent and counsel of the brothers, the mortal remains of such a great prince, which will be a true treasure for our church. This prince was raised among us, he spent the greater part of his life here; it is in our midst that he perished for justice. If he is taken from us, we have to fear the destruction of the city and of this church; if he remains with us, he will protect us against the punishments that the treason of which he was a victim may attract." These supplications only irritated the provost: people ran to arms and the city was about to be bloodied again, when all parties were appeased by the healing of a paralyzed child who had invoked the intercession of the blessed Charles. People then hastened to venerate the mortal remains of the Blessed; they were eager to soak cloths in his blood, to take some fragments of his clothing or his hair, the touch of which operated various healings.

The provost could do nothing other than let the funeral be carried out; the service took place on Friday, March 4, in the church of Saint-Pierre-outside-the-Walls; the mutilated body of Charles was placed in a coffin and then deposited in a vault of the church of Saint-Donatien.

The punishment of Charles's murderers did not wait. We could not, without straying from our subject, reproduce here the moving accounts that the chroniclers of the time give on this subject; but we cannot refrain from recounting, in a few words, the miserable end of the count's enemies, since it was considered by all contemporaries as a striking testimony rendered by Providence to the memory of the blessed Charles.

The provost had favorably welcomed the competition of William of Ypres, from whom he hoped for impunity; he won partisans for him, but the faithful subjects of Charles the Good, under the leadership of the knight Gervais, who had been the count's chamberlain, hatched a conspiracy against the provost and his partisans, and besieged his castle. They were soon seconded by various lords of Flanders and by the Countess of Holland, who coveted the succession of the vacant throne for her son. The provost and his brother, the castellan Haket, understanding the fate that was reserved for them, asked to provide legal proof of their personal innocence, and demanded that their lives be spared for their nephews, whom they consented to see banished in perpetuity. These proposals were scorned, and the siege continued more ardent than ever. The provost was forced to take refuge in the church of Saint-Donatian, from where he managed to flee into the neighboring marshes.

During the horrors of this siege, the people of Ghent tried to seize the body of Charles the Good by ruse; but they failed in their enterprise. The lords of Flanders, influenced by the advice of Louis the Fat, chose William Clito, son of the Duke of Nor mandy, as their Guillaume Cliton Successor to Charles as Count of Flanders. sovereign. On April 5, the King of France and the new Count of Flanders arrived in Bruges; on the 11th, the provost Bertulf was handed over by William of Ypres, who hoped thereby to clear himself of all suspicion of complicity; the murderer, condemned to the gallows, perished in Ypres amidst the cruelest tortures.

The provost's accomplices, who were holding out in the great tower of Saint-Donatian, did not surrender until April 19. All those who had been involved in the conspiracy had already suffered or then suffered a punishment proportionate to their degree of guilt. Guy of Steenvoorde was hanged in Ypres; Eustace of Steenvoorde was burned alive in the flames of a house where he had sought asylum; Wilfrid Knop, the provost's brother, was thrown from the top of a tower with twenty-eight of his accomplices; Isaac was strangled in the market of Bruges; Robert had his head severed in Cassel; Burchard suffered the torture of the wheel, while repenting of his crime.

The chroniclers add that those who escaped the tortures were banished from Flanders and met a sad end.