Фульк Решен: Граф Анжуйский и его эпоха

French fashion designer (1043 – 1109)

Fulk IV (; 1043 – 14 April 1109), better known as Fulk le Réchin (Fulco Rechin), was the count of Anjou from around 1068 until his death. He was noted to be "a man with many reprehensible, even scandalous, habits" by Orderic Vitalis, who particularly objected to his many women and his influential footwear, claiming he popularized the pigaches that eventually became the poulaine, the medieval long toed shoe.

Fulk was the usual name of the medieval counts of Anjou. It is the English form of the same Germanic masculine given name latinized as Fulco in contemporary accounts and written Foulques in modern French. They are all cognate with the word folk ("people, kin"). Réchin, the epithet by which he is usually known, has no certain translation. Philologists have made numerous and varied suggestions, most but not all negative, including "the Quarreler", "the Rude", "the Sullen", "the Surly", and "the Heroic".

Fulk, born in 1043, was the younger son of Geoffrey II, Count of Gâtinais (sometimes known as Aubri), and Ermengarde of Anjou. Ermengarde was a daughter of Fulk the Black, an earlier count of Anjou, and the sister of Geoffrey Martel who inherited Anjou upon his father's death.

Geoffrey Martel died without direct heirs, leaving Anjou to his nephew Geoffrey III, Fulk's older brother. Some sources declare that his rule was incompetent and Fulk contested the succession, capturing Geoffrey in 1067. Under pressure from the church, he released Geoffrey but the two brothers soon fell to fighting again. The next year Geoffrey was again imprisoned by Fulk, this time for good. Fulk then ruled Anjou from 1068 until his death. Substantial territory was lost to Angevin control due to the difficulties resulting from Geoffrey's poor rule and the brothers' warring. Saintonge was lost, and Fulk had to give the Gâtinais to Philip I of France to placate the king upon his victory. Much of Fulk's rule was devoted to regaining control over this territory and to a complex struggle with Normandy for influence in Maine and Brittany. At some point before 1106, Fulk made a major gift to the Fontevraud Abbey.

There are conflicting accounts of Fulk's life, including some who pointedly condemned him as "a man with many reprehensible, even scandalous, habits". Bertrade bore him Fulk V, who later became count of Anjou and king of the Crusader realm of Jerusalem, before 1092, when she either abandoned Fulk in favor of King Philip I or was abducted by the king. (Accounts vary.) Apparently bigamously, she married the king and became queen of France on 15 May 1092. She was said to have fully reconciled Fulk with the king and the situation.

Fulk died on 14 April 1109 leaving the restoration of the county of Anjou as it had been under Geoffrey III to his successors.

A Latin history of Anjou and its rulerssurviving only in part and now known as A Partial History of Anjou (Fragmentum Historiae Andegavensis)are said to have been written by Fulk in 1096, although both the authorship and authenticity of the work are disputed. The first part of the work describing Fulk's ancestry and some of his ancestor's deeds is extent. A second part which would have dealt with Fulk's own timesif it were ever writtenhas been lost. If he wrote it, it would have been one of the first works of history in medieval Europe written by a layman rather than a cleric. Some scholars propose that Fulk may have actually commissioned the work but used scribes to compose it.

Amid his other denunciations of Fulk, the English historian Orderic Vitalis blamed him for the invention of pigaches, the pointy toed "scorpion tail" shoes, which became fashionable in France and England around this time and later developed into the unwieldy elongated poulaines. Supposedly Fulk began wearing narrow shoes with lengthened toes as a way of hiding his unsightly bunions from his 5th wife Bertrade before she abandoned him in favor of the king. (The fashion historian Ruth Wilcox offers that it may have been a simple adaptation of the Normans' sabatons, which they had extended to a point and turned down in the late 11th century to better hold their stirrups during battle.) In any case, the footwear was considered vain and obsceneif not demonicand were immensely unpopular with the church leadership of the period. St Anselm banned its use by English clerics at the 1102 Synod of Westminster, the papal legate Robert de Courson banned its use by the faculty of the University of Paris in August 1215, and the Fourth Lateran Council finally banned them for all Catholic clergy the same year.