Count Guy II of Thouars, 963-977 AD

(Previously on Royal Dispatch.)

If you had to get murdered, wouldn’t you want your killer to be as compassionate as possible? Of course you would. That’s what makes me such a good person, as murderers go. Time to gently, thoughtfully, and regretfully remove an obstacle to my quest for a de Thouars dukedom.

I do have a teensy mental break due to, you know, remorse and stuff. I choose the resulting permanent penalty that I’m now “improvident” with money, suffering a subtraction on income. That hurts, especially since I also have to shell out gold to bribe an agent to speed the scheme along. Just hoping that greenlighting the consummation of the scheme doesn’t require yet more payola and/or stress on my conflicted murderous heart.

Speaking of stress, turns out my kind, brave, shy young heir Guy 3 is a budding sadist.

Naturally I have to spend more stress-dollars to influence him to back off the sadism in favor of acquiring the “ambitious” trait, which is actually not a bad result really. Being ambitious comes with lots of bonuses, while making your liege suspicious of you (and rightly so, considering I’m also ambitious and am currently attempting to murder my liege’s heir).

My relations with the Pope improve enough that I’m comfortable hitting him up for gold again, even as I donate to charity in order to reduce stress. Plus it looks like I’ll be dealing with a peasant rebellion in the county of Nantes soon, so best be ready for that in terms of peasant-crushing soldier goons.

Due to my convenient station as spymaster, my scheme quickly matures, and my liege’s unfortunate heir meets his very timely end, as far as I’m concerned.

And as I hoped, now only one of Duke Geoffroy’s daughters stands to inherit the Duchy of Poitou that I covet. All I have to do is not die or go insane from stress before then. The rebels do emerge in Nantes and are routinely crushed by my goons. I capture the peasant leader and force him to join my army as a knight. I teeter on the edge of another stress-fueled mental break as I get sucked into weird interpersonal drama at court. Can’t these people see I have more important things to do!!

But then … well well well, look what we have here.

Duke Geoffroy is dead, his realm divided. The die is cast. I’m going for Poitou, now the only duchy held by my new liege, the Duchess Bourguigne de Poitou. I only control one of the four counties of Poitou—the family home of Thouars. I have claims on Montaigu and Poitiers. Duchess Bourguigne controls Lusignan. It’s her only county.

I need to control two of the other three counties before making war on my liege for independence, and then possibly again to usurp her dukedom title. Much to do. No stress!

I declare war on my dear cousin Adrien Thours-Montaigu—that’s a cadet branch of House Thouars created by an ambitious uncle—for the county of Montaigu. His army is small, and he has no allies, so he blows his treasury on mercenaries. It won’t be enough. Right as the war starts, my son and heir Guy the Third comes of age. Lacking any compelling alliance candidates or interesting genetic profiles, I marry him off to a lovely Bavarian lass with the excellent name of Mechthild von Kempten.

Cousin Adrien puts up a better fight than expected, given his mercenary army. They lose the first battle, but manage to kill my commander, who also happens to be one of my sons-in-law. His bereaved wife and my daughter Jeanne is soon married off once again to Count Bohemond Taillefer of nearby Angouleme to the south, who could prove useful in the coming war against my liege.

Stress drives me to one of the rare beneficial mental breaks—I become “athletic,” which allows me to exercise the pain away occasionally, at the cost of becoming smelly and unpleasant for awhile afterward.

Ah, young daughter Euphrosine is ready to be married. Still no good alliance candidates out there I’m afraid. Where is the flower of our medieval French youth! Instead Euphrosine matrilineally marries a robust Bavarian lad named Dietrich von Meran, supplying me yet another ready sword arm at least.

I am gathering gold and emotional resources to attack the county of Poitiers—another piece of the duchy of Poitou—when my sad liege Duchess Bourguigne attacks Brittany to the north on behalf of one of my claims there, for the county of Penthievre. What a sweetheart she is. If I could achieve my ducal dreams without crushing her own, I would so do! Alas…

But in the meanwhile, who am I to deny her desire to expand my lands? It would be fine if she exhausted her own troops in the war, but she’s lollygagging, and my nearby holdings are already under siege by the Breton lordling on the other side of Bourguigne’s war, a no-account dude named Count Galeazzo Guideschi. True to form, Galeazzo gets himself captured in the first battle with my army and the war is immediately over.

The Breton county of Penthievre joins my lands. At 6 total counties, I’m now well over my domain limit of 4, incurring penalties on my cash and troops. The goal is to cling to everything just long enough to gain that duchy, which will let me get all these holdings organized.

An unfortunate and unanticipated consequence of allowing this maneuver though is that Duchess Bourguigne now has a favor hook on me. Irritating. Hope she doesn’t use that against me somehow!!!

I decide I need to cement my control of the rest of Poitou before challenging Bourguigne directly. This is a little dicey because the remaining county of Poitiers is owned by Count Bourguigne Gellones (not to be confused with Duchess Bourguigne de Poitou, my liege, for the moment), who is a vassal of Duke Gilbert Gellones of Barcelona. So I have to fight him, not just the littler Bourguigne. Fortunately Gilbert appears to be rather weak.

Right as I declare war versus Duke Gilbert, my youngest daughter Ida comes of age, marrying matrilineally once again to a jaunty Franconian named Lutbert von Heinsberg. Another ‘bert in the mix.

He has a cool hat! Gonna call you Hatbert, I says to my son-in-law.

My lovely and hopefully soon to be ex-liege burns the favor I owe her to increase my feudal contract obligations. Don’t get too used to it, my lady.

The first of my grandchildren to come of age is young Hugues (my daughter Jeanne’s boy, like we say in the south—the American South, not the South of France). I marry him to a scowling Poblanian girl who happens to be a heathenish Slovianskan religionist to boot. But, once she agrees to the match and is in my court, she quickly agrees to convert to proper popery. She’s got the genius inheritable trait, so worth a little extra trouble to get her into the family gene pool.

War-wise, I take Poitiers with no trouble and chase the wreckage of Gilbert’s army through three battles all the way back to Barcelona. My liege Duchess Bourguigne declares war on her neighbor the Duchess Maria Gellones-Toulouse of Aquitaine. The instability I created by breaking up that family’s titles is really paying some fun dividends.

Gilbert’s army, reduced to its fastest units, is now faster than me and runs all the way back to Poitiers in a futile attempt to break my occupation. We clash again, off he runs. I’m about to chase him again when the idiot Duchess Maria lays siege to my home of Thouars, as if that’s not the one place where she will certainly get smashed. I knock her off the siege, then turn and scrap with Gilbert once again. His army is still toddling around even though by now I’ve captured half his knights and nobles. But eventually his time runs out, the war is over, and Poitiers is mine as well.

Now, now, now! Now before Duchess Bourguigne can defeat Aquitaine, it is time to finally strike and make what I hope is the final move in this three-generation plan to get a god damned duchy of our very own.

The funny thing is that the bulk of the troops Bourguigne was using in her war on Aquitaine were actually levies from my lands, since I am (or was) her only vassal. Now they’re all back working for me, and her army is vastly reduced.

Our first skirmish is a decisive victory for my armies, which I happen to be personally leading due to my high martial skill. This is risky, as there’s always a chance of getting yourself killed on the battlefield and throwing a wrench in all carefully laid plans. My heart stops (mine, the player’s, metaphorically) when Count Guy 2 is wounded, but he recovers almost immediately due to the skills of the court physician. Government healthcare at its finest.

With Bourguigne’s army out of the way, I siege her only county of Lusignan and rapidly take it. With no holdings of her own remaining, she is destitute, landless, and free.

No rich robes for her anymore, just variations on beige from now on!

I am now a direct subject of the king and free to re-create and claim not just the duchy of Poitou, but also the duchy of Brittany. To do either though, I need to spend some time amassing enough gold to fund all that paperwork.

Recognizing that I am a badass, my new liege King Louis III appoints me as his chancellor. Useful but what I really need is gold. Lots and lots of gold.

I’m on tenterhooks watching the taxes roll in, just waiting to die of a stroke or get invaded by ravening Vikings or whatever. But in the fullness of time, the treasury is full enough, and!

[sickos voice] Yes … ha ha ha … yes!!

Now, the first thing I need to do is make with the vassalizin’. I immediately grant all four counties I own in Brittany to my son Guy 3. As I have ascended to become Duke Guy, he is the new Count Guy. This means I’m no longer straining the bureaucracy by controlling too many counties personally, and my taxes and troop levies should settle down. And it keeps all the land in the family, since Count Guy will just inherit all my stuff when I die, and he can divvy it up as he sees fit. Everything’s turning out just as I planned! What could possibly go wrong!

Next: No one expects the Spanish Jihad.