CHANGE of NAME (URL)

Starting today we changed the website URL (name) of our blogs-website…

Initially “castlelifes.com" now “castlesouls.com"

The reasons are that

1.“lifes” is not a proper English word, nut was used because of availability of domain names.

2. We are and will be talking about people who live in castles or at least are associated with the         circles of its castle-lords… but also about history and the ones who build them as well who spent their lives within such walls in the near as well as distant past.

Hence we thought that relating to their souls was a more appropriate approach.

In order to emphasize this, we are posting today 2 youtube videos about the history of the 3 historical people that are associated with the origins of Montbrun Castle and the nobility of the Angevin Empire. They basically tell the same story with a somewhat different view and leave out certain facts or adjust them according to the presenters views and purpose.

Obviously, not all that is stated as being genuine is true… but then, even today, history books are often written for the purpose of political correctness in the time that they are published.

Even though much of what you might see and listen to today will be a honest survey of these events… the details and reasoning will be at times off and incorrect.

That doesn’t take away that it contains interesting points and a good view on history.

A short introduction to these videos as the basis of these stories contain the complicated political relationship existing between France and England in the the 12th century ultimately derived from the position of William the Conqueror and thereafter. The natural alarm caused to the Capetian kings by their overmighty vassals, the earls of Normandy, who were also kings of England, was greatly increased in the 1150s. Henry Plantagenet, already duke of Normandy (1150) and count of Anjou (1151), became not only duke of Aquitaine in 1152—by right of his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, recently divorced from Louis VII of France—but also king of England, as Henry II, in 1154.

A long conflict inevitably ensued, in which the French kings steadily reduced and weakened the Angevin empire. This struggle, which could well be termed the “First Hundred Years’ War,” was ended by the Treaty of Paris between Henry III of England and Louis IX of France, which was finally ratified in December 1259. By this treaty Henry III was to retain the duchy of Guyenne (a much-reduced vestige of Aquitaine with Gascony), doing homage for it to the French king, but had to resign his claim to Normandy, Anjou, Poitou, and most of the other lands from Henry II’s original Angevin Empire, which , in any case, the English had already lost. 

In return, Louis pledged himself to hand over to the English in due course certain territory which protected the border of Guyenne: lower Saintonge, Agenais, and some lands in Quercy. This treaty stood a fair chance of being respected by two rulers such as Henry and Louis, who admired each other and were closely related (there were marriages between them and each other’s sisters), but it posed many problems for the future. It had been agreed, for instance, that the lands in Saintonge, Agenais, and Quercy, which were held at the time of the treaty by Louis IX’s brother Alphonse, count of Poitiers and Toulouse, should go to the English at his death if he had no heir. When Alphonse died without issue in 1271, the new king of France, Philip III, tried to evade the agreement, and the question was not settled until Edward I of England received the lands in Agenais by the Treaty of Amiens (1279) and those in Saintonge by the Treaty of Paris (1286). Edward surrendered his treaty rights to the Quercy lands. By the Treaty of Amiens, moreover, Philip acknowledged the rights of Edward’s consort, Eleanor of Castile, to the countship of Ponthieu.

Hundred Years of War, intermittent struggle between England and France in the 14th–15th century over a series of disputes, including the question of the legitimate succession to the French crown. The struggle involved several generations of English and French claimants to the crown and actually occupied a period of more than 100 years. By convention the war is said to have started on May 24, 1337, with the confiscation of the English-held duchy of Guyenne by French King Philip VI. This confiscation, however, had been preceded by periodic fighting over the question of English fiefs in France going back to the 12th century.