Count Geoffrey Plantagenet of Anjou ²

  General Notes:

Burke says the marriage was 3 Apr 1127. The name Plantagenet, according to Rapin, came from when Fulk the Great being stung from remorse for some wicked action, in order to atone for it, went a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and was scourged before the Holy Sepulchre with broom twigs. Earlier authorities say it was because Geoffrey bore a branch of yellow broom (Planta-genistae) in his helm.

Encyclopedia Brittanica: By his marriage to Matilda, Geoffrey IV Plantagenet acquired a claim to Normandy and England. Forced to spend his whole life fighting his rivals and the Angevin castellans, he nevertheless succeeded in pacifying Anjou, which in 1151 he left to his son Henry (later Henry II of England), Count of Anjou and Maine and Duke of Normandy, who married Eleanor of Aquitaine after the annulment of her marriage to Louis VII of France. Thus the Anglo-Angevin empire of the Plantagenet dynasty was founded, extending from England to the Pyrenees.

also called GEOFFREY PLANTAGENET, byname GEOFFREY THE FAIR, French GEOFFROI PLANTAGENET, OR GEOFFROI LE BEL, count of Anjou (1131-51), Maine, and Touraine and ancestor of the Plantagenet kings of England through his marriage, in June 1128, to Matilda, daughter of Henry I of England. On Henry's death (1135), Geoffrey claimed the duchy of Normandy; he finally conquered it in 1144 and ruled there as duke until he gave it to his son Henry (later King Henry II of England) in 1150.

Geoffrey was popular with the Normans, but he had to suppress a rebellion of malcontent Angevin nobles. After a short war with Louis VII of France, Geoffrey signed a treaty (August 1151) by which he surrendered the whole of Norman Vexin (the border area between Normandy and Île-de-France) to Louis.

  Noted events in his life were:

• Title, 1129. ⁴ Count of Anjou

• Title, Between 1144 and 1150. ³ Duke of Normandy

• Title, 1129. ³ Count of Maine

Geoffrey married Empress Matilda Beauclerc of Germany, daughter of King Henry Beauclerc I and Matilda of Scotland, on 22 May 1128 in Le Mans, , Pays de la Loire, FRA.¹ (Empress Matilda Beauclerc of Germany was born about 1103 in Winchester, Hampshire, England ⁵ and died on 10 Sep 1167 in Rouen, Normandy, France ⁵.)