For more than a hundred years after the accession of Hugh Capet, the history of the kingdom which he founded consists chiefly of the struggles of the great feudataries among themselves to get and to keep control over the action of the crown. The duke of the French had gained little save in name by his royal coronation and unction. He was no nearer than his Karolingian predecessors had been to actual supremacy over the Norman duchy, the Breton peninsula, and the whole of southern Gaul. Aquitaine indeed passed from cold contempt to open aggression. When one of her princes, the count of Poitou, had at length made unwilling submission to the northern king, a champion of southern independence issued from far Périgord to punish him, stormed Poitiers, marched up to the Loire, and sat down in triumph before Tours, whose count, Odo of Blois, was powerless to relieve it. The king himself could find no more practical remonstrance than the indignant question, “Who made thee count?” and the sole reply vouchsafed by Adalbert of Périgord was the fair retort, “Who made thee king?” Tours fell into his hands, and was made over, perhaps in mockery, to the youthful count of Anjou. The loyalty of its governor and citizens, however, soon restored it to its lawful owner, and Adalbert’s dreams of conquest ended in failure and retreat.[296] Still, Aquitaine remained independent as of old; Hugh’s real kingdom took in little more than the old duchy of France “between Seine and Loire”; and even within these limits it almost seemed that in grasping at the shadow of the crown he had loosened his hold on the substance of his ducal power. The regal authority was virtually a tool in the hands of whichever feudatary could secure its exercise for his own ends. As yet Aquitaine and Britanny stood aloof from the struggle; Normandy had not yet entered upon it; at present therefore it lay between the vassals of the duchy of France. Foremost among them in power, wealth, and extent of territory was the count of Blois, Chartres and Tours. His dominions pressed close against the eastern border of Anjou, and it was on her ability to cope with him that her fate chiefly depended. Was the house of Anjou or the house of Blois to win the pre-eminence in central Gaul? This was the problem which confronted Fulk the Black, and to whose solution he devoted his life. His whole course was governed by one fixed principle and directed to one paramount object--the consolidation of his marchland. To that object everything else was made subservient. Every advantage thrown in his way by circumstances, by the misfortunes, mistakes or weaknesses of foes or friends--for he used the one as unscrupulously as the other--was caught up and pursued with relentless vigour. One thread of settled policy ran through the seemingly tangled skein of his life, a thread never broken even by the wildest outbursts of his almost demoniac temper or his superstitious alarms.