The last doors
At the end of July the research worked through its entire remaining list of open medieval doors, twenty-five of them, and closed every one. What came through was the rest of Europe: Germany, Navarre, Castile and León, the Carolingian emperors, a troubadour, and a princess who waited twenty-five years for Richard the Lionheart.
Every research project keeps a list of the doors it has not yet opened. At the end of July this one's list stood at twenty-five, every unexplored parent of every documented medieval ancestor, and in one long campaign the research went through them all. Every door was either opened on the standard authorities and wired, or honestly marked: a floor where the records stop, a frontier where documentation gives way to legend, a legend firmly rejected. There are now no open doors left before the year 1500. What follows is what came through, and it amounts to the rest of Europe.
Germany first. Hugh Capet, King of France and already twice an ancestor here, had a mother: Hedwig of Saxony, daughter of Henry the Fowler, King of Germany, the founder of the Ottonian dynasty. His son Otto the Great, first emperor of the new line, is a collateral, the brother of two ancestresses, but the Fowler himself stands in the direct line, and with him the German kingdom joins the tree. France, meanwhile, arrived a third time, and by the best story in the wave: Alys of France, daughter of King Louis VII, was betrothed to Richard the Lionheart for twenty-five years while her dowry lands were argued over, and famously never married him. Her actual marriage, made late and quietly to the Count of Ponthieu, produced the grandmother of Eleanor of Castile, and so leads here. The princess the Lionheart kept waiting is a direct ancestress; the Lionheart himself, brother of the ancestral King John, is merely a cousin.
Behind Eleanor of Aquitaine, already in the line, the wave opened her own south: her grandfather William IX of Aquitaine, the Troubadour, the first poet in any modern European tongue whose songs survive, with his wife Philippa, heiress of Toulouse. A family that has spent a month acquiring kings should pause on him: the ancestor who matters here is not another crown but the man who more or less invented the love song.
Iberia came in whole. Asturias, the mountain kingdom that held out when the peninsula fell, through Alfonso III the Great; León, which Asturias became, through Ramiro II and the man crowned 'Emperor of All Spain' in its cathedral city in 1135; Castile beside it; and Navarre, from Sancho the Great, who made Pamplona the master of christian Spain, back to Íñigo Arista himself, the founder-king, dead in 851, above whom nothing is wired because nothing is recorded. Even the little Pyrenean county of Aragón is here, its Aznar counts wired to about the year 809, older than most of the crowns on these pages.
And the wave finished older business. The Carolingian emperors between Charlemagne and the counted lines, Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald, are wired at last rather than gestured at. The princely houses that stitch the crowns together came in by name: Toulouse and Provence, Blois and Burgundy, Meulan and Beaumont, Warenne and Bohun, Ponthieu and Dammartin. The Butlers of Ormond, the door through which the Plantagenets first entered this tree, are floored at Theobald Walter, first Chief Butler of Ireland, whose brother Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, effectively governed England and raised the Lionheart's ransom: the family now stands one brother from the man who bought the king back.
The honest edges moved too, and they are worth their sentence. The de Burgh tale of descent from the Conqueror's mother is in the tree as a rejected legend, labelled as such. The Kavanagh Kings of Leinster are wired to their own founder, but their traditional descent from Diarmait Mac Murchada is kept as tradition, not fact; Diarmait remains an ancestor by roads that are proven. And the true frontiers, Íñigo Arista, Anscar of Ivrea, Boso of Arles, Baldwin of Flanders, Crinan of Dunkeld, the Domesday Aubrey, stand exactly where the records leave them, wired no further. When the doors finished closing, the count stood where it stands now: eighteen royal houses and sixteen sovereign crowns, every one documented in the direct line, drawn house by house in The Royal Houses. There are no open doors left before 1500. There are only floors, frontiers, and the one wall that matters: a man named Damery, walking into Bandon about 1690, still waiting for his.