Originally Posted by Raptor1
No!
...Okay, fine.
Our story begins with Duke Conan II of the glorious independent Duchy of Brittany. Said Duke was unmarried, and so was Duchess Matilda of a Whole Bunch of Stuff. Seeing a chance to grab all of that, he immediately proposed marriage, and because Matilda obviously couldn't resist being married to someone named 'Conan' she accepted.
Alas, within several years Conan died at the age of 40 (Murder, I say!) and was inherited by his and Matilda's eldest sun, Charles I. Now, Charles I was very anxious to see his mother dead, as once that cow kicked the bucket he'd be first in line to inherit about half of Italy. But in the meantime a Crusade was called and he sailed for the Middle East. Despite occupying most of the Holy Land, he was promptly kicked out by overwhelming numbers and returned to Brittany. At this point Charles decided that France was acting rather suspiciously, so he asked the Holy Roman Emperor if he could join him (Only temporarily, of course). Now, Matilda, who at age 50 something still wasn't dead, decided to take her Duchies and declare independence from the Empire. However, she was promptly crushed and sent to the dungeon.
Charles then married the new Duchess of Normandy, and they had a son, who, highly imaginatively, was also called Charles. Deciding he was rather bored, he started plotting to murder his bastard half-brother, who was being rather a pest. He was also asked to join a conspiracy to lower crown authority in the Empire and accepted because he hated that whole crown authority thing. Finally, he married his sister off to the King of Scotland, since he seemed like a nice person who only had about even odds of trying to murder him.
This is the point everything fell apart. That bloody Bishop got drunk and decided to tell everyone about Charles' plot, which was not at all very nice. Then, the conspirators in the Holy Roman Empire decided to go ahead and start a civil war, which Charles hadn't really counted on. And then Duchess Matilda finally died, leaving Charles with a bunch of Italian Duchies and a horde of angry subjects.
After a moderately successful campaign against the Imperial armies for several months, Charles was pretty thoroughly crushed as his allies were incompetent. Several months later, he died (Again, no evidence, but murder!) and left the throne to the several-years' old Charles II, who was also the heir to the Duchy of Normandy.
Now, it seems that quite literally everybody in the realm hated young Charles II, and within six months he found himself with more knives in his back than there was surface area for. Being dead and all, the Duchy of Brittany transferred to some backstabbing treacherous woman, while the inherited Italian Duchies transferred to the aforementioned sister of Charles I, who I forgot the name of, the Queen Consort of Scotland. Said sister had a son, but he was of his father's dynasty and so was pretty useless. A short-lived plot to murder the King of Scotland turned out useless as she died four years later, and Prince Roger of Scotland inherited the rest of the dynasty's possessions.
And that was that. The moral of the story is: murder your half-brother before doing other things. Or something like that...
|