Over sea the king’s partisans were ready to welcome him. At La Rochelle the barons of Aquitaine came crowding to offer him their allegiance.[872] Leaving La Rochelle on February 20, he moved northward to Mervant, in the middle of Lower Poitou. Mervant belonged to Geoffrey de Lusignan; and the king’s visit to this place may have been connected with some negotiations between him and the Lusignan family which were certainly begun soon after his landing in Aquitaine. He next proceeded southward, to the abbey of La Grâce-Dieu on the border of Saintonge; on February 25 he was at Niort.[873] Meanwhile he had opened communications with the men of Périgord and the viscounts of Limoges and Turenne.[874] On March 6 he was back at La Rochelle, whence he sent on the 8th, in letters patent addressed to the “good men” of all the chief cities of England, the following account of his expedition: “Know ye that we and our faithful followers whom we brought with us to Poitou are safe and well, and by God’s grace we have already begun to expedite our affairs to the joy and gladness of our friends and the confusion of our foes. For on the Sunday before Mid-Lent {March 2} we laid siege to the castle of Milécu, which Porteclin de Mausé had fortified against us, and on the following Tuesday {March 4} we took it.”[875] Moving across Saintonge and up the Charente, he reached Angoulême on the 13th, stayed there two days, then advanced eastward to Saint-Junien and Aixe in the Limousin;[876] at Aixe, on March 22, he granted the seneschalship of Limoges to Emeric de Roche, and that of Périgord to Geoffrey Teyson.[877] On Palm Sunday, March 23, he left Aixe, and thence he struck right across the county of La Marche to Saint-Vaury and La Souterraine, on the southern border of Berry; he spent Good Friday and Easter at La Souterraine,[878] and there, on Easter Day (March 30), he received the homage of the count of Périgord.[879] He then re-crossed La Marche and the Limousin--stopping this time for two days at Grandmont, where the monks evidently still had a ready welcome for the son of their old friend King Henry--back to Limoges and Angoulême, Cognac and Saintes; thence, turning southward, he proceeded through Périgord as far as La Réole in the county of Agen. On April 20 he was back at Mausé in Saintonge, and for the next fortnight he was never far from either La Rochelle or Niort; but on May 6 he was at Saint-Léger in Anjou, and it was there that he spent Ascension Day, May 8. Two days later he was again at Niort.[880]