Suggest an Edit — Charles I, Count of Flanders

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Biography

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Charles, later called Charles the Good, was born in Denmark in the later eleventh century, the son of King Canute IV of Denmark and Adela of Flanders. His father, a king afterward honored as a saint and martyr, was slain in 1086 during a revolt at Odense. Adela then returned with her child to her native Flanders. Charles was reared at the comital court, first in the household of his grandfather Count Robert I and thereafter under his uncle Count Robert II. Through his mother he belonged to the ruling house of Flanders and through his father to the Danish royal line. Writers of the twelfth century present him as a man of marked piety, personal austerity, and military skill, shaped by the religious and chivalric culture of the Flemish court.

Before he obtained the county, Charles spent periods away from Flanders and is reported to have made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the early twelfth century. In 1119 his cousin Count Baldwin VII died without direct heirs after being mortally wounded in warfare. Baldwin had named Charles as successor, and Charles was accepted as Count of Flanders. He married Margaret of Clermont, daughter of Count Renaud II of Clermont. The marriage remained childless, a circumstance that later contributed to a severe succession crisis.

As count, Charles gained a reputation for even-handed justice and for defending the poor and those of unfree status against the abuses of powerful lineages. During a grave famine in the mid-1120s he intervened in the grain market, punished hoarding and speculation, and sought to keep bread available to the hungry. These measures, together with his insistence on public peace, earned him the lasting epithet of the Good. He also attempted to establish the legal condition of certain great families. The Erembald clan, which held the castellany of Bruges and was widely believed to have risen from servile origins, came under investigation. Fear of loss of rank and office led members of that family to conspire against him.

On 2 March 1127, while Charles was at prayer in the collegiate church of Saint Donatian in Bruges, conspirators of the Erembald connection attacked and killed him near the altar. The slaying of a ruler already regarded as just, committed in a consecrated place, caused widespread shock. Galbert of Bruges, a notary of the town, wrote a detailed contemporary Latin narrative of the murder and of the violent unsettlement that followed. Charles was buried in the church in which he died. Because he left no children, Flanders was disputed among several claimants until Thierry of Alsace secured the countship. Veneration of Charles as a martyr began immediately. In the nineteenth century Pope Leo XIII confirmed the ancient cult, and Charles is commemorated on 2 March.

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