One is tempted to think that the excited brains of the closing tenth century, filled with dim presages of horror that were floating about in expectation of the speedy end of the world, must have wrought out this strange tale by way of explaining the career of Fulk the Black.[294] His contemporaries may well have reckoned him among the phenomena of the time; they may well have had recourse to a theory of supernatural agency or demoniac possession to account for the rapid developement of talents and passions which both alike seemed almost more than human. When the county of Anjou was left to him by the death of his father Geoffrey Greygown, Fulk was a child scarce eight years old.[295] Surrounded by powerful foes whom Geoffrey’s aggressions had provoked rather than checked--without an ally or protector unless it were the new king--Fulk began life with everything against him. Yet before he has reached the years of manhood the young count meets us at every turn, and always in triumph. Throughout the fifty-three years of his reign Fulk is one of the most conspicuous and brilliant figures in French history. His character seems at times strangely self-contradictory. Mad bursts of passion, which would have been the ruin of an ordinary man, but which seem scarcely to have made a break in his cool, calculating, far-seeing policy; a rapid and unerring perception of his own ends, a relentless obstinacy in pursuing them, an utter disregard of the wrong and suffering which their pursuit might involve; and then ever and anon fits of vehement repentance, ignorant, blind, fruitless as far as any lasting amendment was concerned, yet at once awe-striking and touching in its short-lived, wrong-headed earnestness--all these seeming contradictions yet make up, not a puzzling abstraction, but an intensely living character--the character, in a word, of the typical Angevin count. [294] “Fulco Nerra” or “Niger,” “Palmerius” and “Hierosolymitanus” are his historical surnames. I can find no hint whether the first was derived from his complexion or from the colour of the armour which he usually wore (as in the case of the “Black Prince”); the origin of the two last will be seen later. [295] This is on the supposition that Adela of Chalon was his mother; see note C to chap. ii. above.