in his first and last public defeat. Nevertheless he obstinately pursued his projects. The Poitevins, by the death of their count, were left, as their own chronicler says, “as sheep having no shepherd”; there was a party among them ready to support the claims of Agnes’s sons against their elder half-brother Odo of Gascony; and one of the leaders of this party, William of Parthenay, built with Angevin help a fortress at Germont in which he held out successfully against the besieging forces of Odo. The count of Gascony then proceeded to Mausé, another stronghold of his enemies, and in assaulting this place he was slain.[397] He left no children; the elder of Geoffrey Martel’s stepsons was now therefore heir to Poitou. The boys were twins; the third child of Agnes was a girl, who bore her mother’s name, and for whom her mother and stepfather contrived in 1043 to arrange a marriage with no less important a personage than the Emperor Henry III.,[398] whose first wife had been a daughter of Cnut. It was not till the year after this imperial wedding that the troubled affairs of Aquitaine were definitely settled. In 1044 Countess Agnes came to Poitiers accompanied by her two sons, Peter and Geoffrey, and her husband, their stepfather, Geoffrey Martel; there they held with the chief nobles of Poitou a council at which Peter, or William as he was thenceforth called, was solemnly ordained as duke of Aquitaine, and his brother sent into Gascony to become its count.[399] Agnes at least must now have attained her object; whether Geoffrey Martel was equally satisfied with the result of his schemes may be a question, for we do not clearly know how wide the range of those schemes really was. If, as seems likely, they included the hope of acquiring a lasting hold over Aquitaine, then their issue was a failure. By the victory of Montcontour Geoffrey had gained for himself at one blow a great military reputation; but for Anjou the only solid gain was the acquisition of Saintonge, and this, like some of the outlying possessions of the house of Blois, soon proved more trouble than profit. If Martel expected that his stepsons would hold themselves indebted to him for their coronets and remain his grateful and dutiful miscalculation. The marriage of a duchess-dowager of Aquitaine with Geoffrey Martel naturally suggests thoughts of the marriage of a duchess-regnant with a later count of Anjou; but the resemblance between the two cases is of the most superficial kind; the earlier connexion between Anjou and Aquitaine did little or nothing to pave the way for their later union. Geoffrey himself, indeed, had already discovered that although the count of Vendôme might go seeking adventures in the south, the duties and the interests of the count of Anjou still lay to the north, or at the utmost no farther away than the banks of the great frontier-river. [392] Chron. S. Maxent. a. 1010 (Marchegay, _Eglises_, pp. 387, 388).