Bourges, had, however, for a long time past been lost to the dukes and reckoned as part of the Royal Domain of France. On the eastern and south-eastern borders of the duchy lay the counties of Auvergne and Toulouse. Toulouse, with its dependencies—the Quercy or county of Cahors, Alby, Foix, Carcassonne, Cerdagne and Roussillon—had always been a separate fief held directly of the Crown; but the right to its ownership had for the last sixty years been in dispute between the Poitevin counts and its actual holders, the house of St. Gilles, who also held the neighbouring county of Rouergue and with it the overlordship of a number of smaller fiefs along the southern coast. Auvergne, originally a part of the Aquitanian duchy, was strongly disposed to reject the authority of the Poitevin dukes; and both Auvergne and Toulouse were more or less openly supported in this matter by the French king. Nor were the other underfiefs of the duchy, or even the barons of Poitou, by any means models of feudal obedience. For a century or more the dukes had been periodically at strife with the counts of Angoulême, the counts of La Marche, the lords of Lusignan (in Poitou), the viscounts of Limoges, and the neighbours and rivals of these last.[11] It was little more than twenty years since Count William of Angoulême had carried off from Poitiers Eleanor’s stepmother, the Countess Emma, “by the counsel of the chiefs of the Limousin who feared lest the Poitevin yoke should be laid more heavily upon them” owing to her marriage with the duke, she being a daughter and a possible co-heiress of the viscount of Limoges.[12] At Limoges itself, moreover, there seems to have been a perennial rivalry between the bishop, the viscount, the abbot of the great abbey of S. Martial, and the townsfolk.[13]