Some medieval musings

I had a bad back “episode” which kept me off the computer for a while. But I am not feeling like a human pretzel at the moment so I thought I could risk making a quick Facebook visit. Here are the happenings for December 17th in medieval history.
Baldwin, Count of Hainaut and Count of Flanders died on that date in 1195. He was the father of Philippe Capet’s unfortunate wife, Isabelle, who died in childbirth at age twenty. He’d wed the sister of Philip d’Alsace, the Count of Flanders, who appears as a character in Devil’s Brood and Lionheart and will pop up again in my current novel. When Philip died at the siege of Acre without a legitimate heir to succeed him, Flanders passed to Baldwin, his brother-in-law. Philip had been wed to the niece of Eleanor, daughter of her sister Petronilla, and he’d claimed her inheritance of Vermandois after contending she’d been unfaithful; some historians and some of his contemporaries were skeptical of that, but it did not help his wife or the poor soul whom Philip alleged to have been her lover; he met a very unpleasant end.
To show how impossibly entangled the lives of these people were, Baldwin’s son, also a Baldwin, succeeded him as Count of Flanders and wed the daughter of Marie of Champagne, the younger sister of Henri in Lionheart, and he was said to have loved her “with a fervent love.” Both he and his Marie died young, though, victims of that shameful farce known as the Fourth Crusade, which never reached the Holy Land, choosing instead to sack the Christian city of Constantinople. Baldwin was then named as the first Latin Emperor of what we today call the Byzantine Empire, and died as a prisoner in Bulgaria, most likely put to death. Marie, not knowing of this, had sailed to join him at Acre, where she then took ill and died.
With such cheerful offerings, you all must wish I’d stayed off-line for a while longer!