wedge between Normandy and Flanders; but the wedge was too small and too insignificant to be of any real use in keeping them apart. On the other hand, the count of Flanders was on his northern and eastern frontiers in direct touch with Richard’s German allies; and one at least of these, the count of Hainaut, was also in direct touch with Champagne. Richard was in fact gradually drawing round the Royal Domain of France a circle which was already more than half completed; and he was now politically in a position to bring almost the whole of his own military resources to bear upon some of its uncompleted sections in the west and south without fear of danger in his rear. The voluntary adhesion of Britanny promised at least a temporary respite from trouble in that quarter. In Aquitaine his determined efforts to enforce order and tranquillity were at last beginning to bear fruit. In 1195 he had granted the county of Poitou to his sister Matilda’s son, Otto of Saxony;[1226] but Otto does not seem to have ever actually taken possession of the county, and the government of Poitou and its dependencies, and also of Gascony, continued to be carried on as before, by seneschals appointed by the king. If these officers needed assistance to quell internal revolt, they could safely depend for it on Navarre; and the one remaining vassal of the duchy with whom they might still have been unable to cope was won over to the interests of his suzerain by the offer of a brilliant and wealthy matrimonial alliance and a substantial increase of territory. The count of Toulouse with whom Richard had fought of [Sidenote: 1196] old died in 1196, and the widowed Queen Joan of Sicily was given in marriage by her brother to the new Count Raymond VI;[1227] Richard renounced the old claim of the Poitevin counts to the possession of Toulouse, restored the Quercy to its former owner, and granted him the county of Agen as Joan’s dowry, with the stipulation that it should always be held as a distinct fief of the duchy of Aquitaine and should furnish the duke with five hundred men-at-arms for a month when required for war in Gascony.[1228] [Sidenote: 1197]