Count of Anjou from 1129 who married Empress Matilda, conquered Normandy in her name between 1142 and 1144, and fathered Henry II; his broom-sprig nickname later gave the Plantagenet kings their name.
Geoffrey of Anjou was count of Anjou and Maine from 1129 to 1151 and duke of Normandy from 1144 to 1150. Married at fourteen to Empress Matilda, the widowed heiress of Henry I of England, he was the junior partner in a famously difficult marriage, but it produced three sons and a claim to the English and Norman inheritance that Geoffrey pursued with patience and force.
While Matilda fought King Stephen in England, Geoffrey stayed on the continent and took Normandy castle by castle, entering Rouen in January 1144. He handed the duchy to their son Henry in 1150 and died the next year, leaving him Anjou, Maine and Normandy, the core of the lands Henry II ruled as king of England. A later tradition says he wore a sprig of broom, planta genista in Latin, and so gained the nickname Plantagenet, which the English royal house adopted as a surname in the fifteenth century.
Geoffrey was born on 24 August 1113, the elder son of Fulk V, count of Anjou, and Ermengarde, heiress of Maine. Anjou and Normandy had fought over Maine for generations, and in 1127 Henry I of England, whose only legitimate son had drowned in the White Ship, arranged for his daughter Empress Matilda to marry the count's heir. On 10 June 1128 at Rouen the king knighted the fourteen-year-old Geoffrey, and a week later, on 17 June, the couple were married at Le Mans. John of Marmoutier, writing some fifty years later, says that at the knighting Henry hung around the youth's neck a shield painted with little gold lions.
The bride was eleven years older, the widow of an emperor, and unwilling to be the wife of a count's son; William of Malmesbury, in his Historia Novella, says the barons had not been consulted and disliked the match. Within a year she had left Geoffrey. In 1129 Fulk sailed east to marry Melisende of Jerusalem and become heir to the kingdom of Jerusalem, leaving Geoffrey to rule Anjou. Matilda came back to him in 1131 after a council of Henry's barons decided she should, and their sons Henry, Geoffrey and William were born in 1133, 1134 and 1136.
The fullest portrait of Geoffrey comes from John of Marmoutier, a monk of the great abbey outside Tours, who wrote a life of the count around 1170–1180. He describes a handsome, red-haired prince, eloquent, cheerful and fond of learning, and tells how during the siege of Montreuil-Bellay Geoffrey read the Roman military writer Vegetius to work out how to set the castle on fire. The work is an admiring family history, and several of its anecdotes, such as Geoffrey graciously pardoning captured rebels, belong to a stock of stories about good princes, but its picture of a lettered and methodical soldier fits his record of slow, successful sieges.
Other writers were harsher. Orderic Vitalis described the Angevin invasion of southern Normandy in 1136 as a campaign of plunder and sacrilege, and Norman chroniclers long regarded Geoffrey's men as foreign raiders. Walter Map and Gerald of Wales, both of whom served at his son's court, later repeated a story that he had an affair with Eleanor of Aquitaine while she was queen of France; this is hostile gossip written decades afterwards and cannot be confirmed. His marriage was plainly strained, yet Geoffrey and Matilda worked together for their son's inheritance for more than fifteen years.
Geoffrey's rule in Anjou was a long struggle to master castle-holding barons. He faced rebellions in 1129, 1135 and 1145–1151, the last backed by his younger brother Elias, whom he imprisoned and who died in captivity in 1151. The most stubborn rebel, Gerard Berlay, held out at Montreuil-Bellay for about three years until Geoffrey took the castle in 1151, and the quarrel over Berlay's imprisonment brought Geoffrey into conflict with Louis VII of France. Peace was made at Paris in August 1151, when Henry did homage to Louis for Normandy.
When Henry I of England died on 1 December 1135, Matilda crossed into Normandy and received border castles such as Argentan and Domfront, but the Norman barons accepted King Stephen. Geoffrey's first campaigns went badly. In 1136 his army ravaged the Hiémois, he was wounded in the foot at the siege of Le Sap, and dysentery drove the Angevins home. In 1139 Matilda crossed to England with her half-brother Robert of Gloucester, and Geoffrey was left to fight in Normandy alone.
The capture of Stephen at Lincoln in February 1141 broke royalist resistance in the duchy. Many Norman lords came over to Geoffrey that year, and in 1142–1143 he overran western Normandy, including Avranches, Mortain and Cherbourg. He entered Rouen in January 1144, received the surrender of its castle in April and took the title of duke, and Louis VII recognised him in return for the border fortress of Gisors. Geoffrey never crossed to England to help his wife, but his conquest proved lasting. In 1150 he handed Normandy to Henry.
On his way home from the Paris meeting Geoffrey fell ill with a fever, and he died at Château-du-Loir on 7 September 1151, aged thirty-eight. John of Marmoutier describes him making gifts to churches and the poor on his deathbed. He was buried in the cathedral of Saint-Julien at Le Mans, where his tomb was marked by the enamel plaque showing him armed with sword and lion-painted shield. The tomb itself was later destroyed, but the plaque survived and is now in the Carré Plantagenêt museum in Le Mans.