ruler--all this is his due, and something more; the credit of having, by the initiative force of genius, launched Anjou upon her career with an impetus such as no opposing power could thenceforth avail to check. One is tempted to wonder how far into the future of his house those keen eyes of the Black Falcon really saw; whether he saw it or not, that future was in a great measure of his own making; for his fifty-three years of work and warfare had been spent in settling the question on which that future depended--the question whether Anjou or Blois was to be the chief power of central Gaul. When his place was taken by Geoffrey Martel, there could no longer be any doubt of the answer. [373] See extract from Martyrology of Ronceray in Marchegay, _Eglises_, p. 395, note 3. [374] See the office in Salies, _Foulques-Nerra_, pp. 499 _et seq._ [375] See Salies, _Foulques-Nerra_, pp. 456 _et seq._ The new count of Anjou began his reign in circumstances very unlike those of his father half a century before. Not only had Fulk wholly changed the political position of Anjou, but Geoffrey’s own position as an individual was totally different. He was no untried boy, left to fight his own way with no weapons save the endowments which nature had given him; he was a full-grown man, trained in the school of Fulk Nerra, and already experienced in politics and war. In his own day Geoffrey Martel was looked up to with as much respect as his father, and with even more dread. His career is an illustration of the saying that nothing succeeds like success. Till he came into collision with the duke of Normandy, he carried all before him like chaff before the wind. He crushed Aquitaine; he won Tours; he won Le Mans. It was no wonder if he delighted to commemorate in the surname of Martel, “the Hammer,” the victorious blows which laid opponent after opponent at the feet of the blacksmith’s foster-son.[376] But Geoffrey was not the artificer of his own fortune. He owed his pre-eminence among the great vassals of the Crown to his extended possessions and his military reputation; he owed his extended possessions more to his father’s labours and to a series of favourable accidents than to his own qualities as a statesman; and he owed his military reputation--as one writer who understood the Angevins thoroughly has very plainly hinted--more to luck than to real generalship.[377] Geoffrey stands at a disadvantage thus far, that in contemplating him one cannot avoid two very trying comparisons. It was as unlucky for his after-fame as it was lucky for his material prosperity that he was the son of Fulk the Black; it was unlucky for him in every way that he was the rival of William the Conqueror. Neither as a statesman, a ruler, a strategist, or a man was Geoffrey equal to his father. As a statesman he showed no very lofty capacity; his designs on Aquitaine, sweeping but pointless, came to nothing in the end: and with regard to Touraine