Count of Blois and Chartres who led an army on the First Crusade, wrote vivid letters home to his wife Adela, deserted the siege of Antioch in 1098 and died in the Holy Land after the Fatimid victory at Ramla in 1102; father of King Stephen of England.
Stephen-Henry was count of Blois, Chartres and Meaux, a great lord of the Loire valley and Champagne whose family rivalled the Capetian kings in wealth. Married to Adela of Normandy, daughter of William the Conqueror, he took the cross in 1096 and led one of the main armies of the First Crusade from northern France to Constantinople and into Anatolia.
The crusade leaders chose him to preside over their council during the siege of Antioch, and his two surviving letters to Adela describe the campaign with pride and detail. On 2 June 1098, the day before the city fell, he left the army and fled north, and his report that the crusade was lost helped persuade Alexios I Komnenos to turn back. Mocked as a deserter, Stephen-Henry returned to the East with the Crusade of 1101 and died after the Fatimid victory at Ramla in May 1102.
Stephen-Henry was born around 1045, the son of Theobald III, count of Blois, and his first wife Gersent of Le Mans. His father held Blois, Chartres, Châteaudun and Meaux and lands in Champagne, and gave Stephen-Henry a share in governing them from the 1070s. Between about 1080 and 1084 he married Adela, a daughter of William the Conqueror and Matilda of Flanders, who was around fifteen and some twenty years younger than him; the wedding at Chartres allied his house with the Anglo-Norman kings. He succeeded his father in 1089, and his seal of that year shows him as a mounted knight with a banner.
Adela proved a capable partner, and the couple issued charters together before the crusade. Their children included William, later lord of Sully; Theobald, who inherited Blois and Champagne; Stephen, the future king of England; and Henry, who became abbot of Glastonbury and bishop of Winchester.
Stephen-Henry speaks for himself in two letters to Adela, written in June 1097 from the camp before the Seljuk capital in Bithynia and in March 1098 from Antioch. They show an affectionate husband and a proud, well-informed commander. He tells her that Alexios received him with great honour, as if he were a son, and loaded him with gifts, that he now has twice the gold and silver he had when he left home, and that the princes have made him leader and director of the whole expedition. His boasting needs care: the post seems to have meant chairing the leaders' councils and managing supplies rather than command in battle.
Almost every other account was written after his flight and is coloured by it. The Gesta Francorum, by a follower of Bohemond I of Antioch, says he pretended to be very ill and withdrew shamefully, and Orderic Vitalis tells how Adela urged him, even in their bed, to go back and redeem his name. Modern historians are fairer to him: he was about fifty-three, may genuinely have been unwell, and had seen the vast army of Kerbogha approaching with no sign that Antioch would fall. His return to the East in 1101, when he could have stayed at home, shows how keenly he felt the disgrace.
Stephen-Henry left France in the autumn of 1096 with his brother-in-law Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy, and Count Robert of Flanders. Robert of Flanders crossed the Adriatic ahead of them, while Stephen-Henry and Robert Curthose wintered in southern Italy and sailed from Brindisi in April 1097. Stephen-Henry reached Constantinople in May and swore the oath demanded by Alexios I Komnenos. He took part in the siege of the Seljuk capital in Bithynia, which surrendered to the Byzantines on 19 June 1097, and in the victory over the Seljuk Turks near Dorylaeum on 1 July.
In October 1097 the crusaders began the siege of Antioch, and Stephen-Henry was chosen to preside over the princes' council. The winter brought famine and desertions, and his letter of March 1098 describes skirmishes with the garrison and the defeat of a relief army. By the end of May the princes knew that Kerbogha, atabeg of Mosul, was close with a great army. On 2 June Stephen-Henry withdrew, pleading illness, to Alexandretta on the coast; that night Bohemond's contact inside Antioch let the crusaders over the walls, and the city fell on 3 June.
From the hills Stephen-Henry saw Kerbogha's army closing round Antioch and concluded that the crusaders were doomed. He travelled north and at Philomelion in Anatolia met Alexios, who was marching to help the crusaders. According to the Gesta Francorum, Stephen-Henry told him that the Franks were surely destroyed, and the emperor, fearing that the Turks would fall on him next, turned back despite the protests of Bohemond's half-brother Guy. The crusaders defeated Kerbogha on 28 June and never forgave the Byzantines for failing to come, a grievance Bohemond used to justify keeping Antioch.
Stephen-Henry came home to scorn, and Pope Paschal II ordered crusaders who had abandoned their vows to go back on pain of excommunication. In 1101 he joined the new expedition of Lombard and French lords. Its main army was destroyed by the Turks near Merzifon in northern Anatolia that summer, but he escaped to Constantinople, sailed to Antioch and went on to Jerusalem, where he kept Easter 1102 and so fulfilled his vow.
Stephen-Henry was preparing to sail home when a Fatimid army from Egypt advanced on Ramla in May 1102. Baldwin I of Jerusalem, believing it a small raiding force, rode out with a few hundred knights, among them Stephen-Henry and other veterans of 1101, and was overwhelmed on 17 May. Baldwin escaped, but the survivors shut themselves in the tower of Ramla, which the Egyptians stormed soon afterwards. Stephen-Henry was killed there or, by other accounts, taken prisoner and executed, probably at Ascalon; 19 May is the date usually given. Fulcher of Chartres, who was in the kingdom at the time, recorded the disaster.