Richard II was also, unquestionably, a man of the Frankish world: a Christian, the first Norman ruler to use the title duke (dux), and the man who commissioned Dudo of Saint-Quentin to write the history of his family, from which we learn about Rollo’s conversion and his assumption of power within the Frankish world. So, far from robbing monks, Richard II actively sponsored and patronized them—and not only in Normandy. This child of Viking stock and Frankish temperament was so well known for his pious generosity that every year Christian monks from the Sinai desert in Egypt traveled the better
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