John had already chosen another heiress to take Isabel’s place. One of the most important, and also most troublesome, feudataries of the duchy of Aquitaine was Ademar, count of Angoulême. It was in a quarrel with him and his half-brother, the viscount of Limoges, that Richard Cœur-de-Lion had met his death, which Richard’s son had avenged by slaying the viscount.[321] The feud between the houses of Angoulême and Limoges thus threatened to be a considerable hindrance to Richard’s successor in his efforts to secure a hold upon his southern duchy. How formidable Ademar and his nephew, the new viscount of Limoges, had already made themselves is shown by the insertion in the treaty between John and Philip of a special provision that John should “receive their homage and grant them their rights.”[322] It is said to have been Philip who counselled John to secure the fidelity of Ademar of Angoulême in another way, by taking to wife Ademar’s only child.[323] Philip’s motives for giving the advice, and John’s motives for following it, are alike obscure. Nineteen years before, Richard, as duke of Aquitaine, had vainly striven to wrest Angoulême from Ademar in behalf of Matilda, the only child of Ademar’s late brother, Count Vulgrin III. Matilda was now the wife of Hugh “the Brown” of Lusignan, who in 1179 or 1180 had, in spite of King Henry, made himself master of the county of La Marche, and whose personal importance in southern Gaul was increased by the rank and fame which his brothers Geoffrey, Guy and Almeric had won in the kingdoms of Jerusalem and Cyprus. The dispute between Matilda and her uncle had been settled by the betrothal of her son--another Hugh the Brown--to Ademar’s daughter and heiress, Isabel.[324] A marriage between John and this little Isabel of Angoulême, therefore, would be certain to provoke the bitter resentment of the whole Lusignan family. On the other hand, it would provoke their resentment against Isabel’s father as well as against her husband, and thus destroy the chance of a coalition of Angoulême and La Marche against their common overlord. It is not impossible that for John, who gambled in politics as habitually as he did at the game of “tables,” the very wantonness of the scheme and the hazards attendant upon it may have only added to its attractions. But his subsequent conduct towards the Lusignans suggests the idea that he may have had a deeper motive, a deliberate purpose of goading them into some outrageous course of action which might enable him to recover La Marche and ruin them completely, or even drive them altogether out of the land.