FEUDAL STATES OF EUROPE 267 ilords. Hugh had inherited from his father, Hugh the iWhite, the most powerful lord of the time, the The early counties of Paris, Senlis, Orleans, and Dreux, Ca P etians land the jurisdiction over two richly endowed abbeys. Hugh 1 the White had also acquired Burgundy, a feudal territory (sliced from the northwest corner of the old kingdom of J Burgundy, but that duchy passed to Hugh's brother. By the time Hugh ended his reign in 996 he had given away so (much land to secure supporters for his dynasty that only [fragments remained of the extensive territory controlled I by his father. His territorial power as king was really less J than it had been as duke. It is true that from the English Channel to the Pyrenees public documents were dated by the year of his reign, but this was merely nominal recogni- tion of his royalty. Of his personal appearance and private life we know nothing with certainty. His immediate suc- cessors were no more powerful than many feudal lords of the time, and were not nearly so interesting personalites as i some of the barons. One hundred years after Hugh Capet's death, Philip I still found interspersed among his villas the castles of men who defied his power and acted as seemed good to them. However, he pushed as far south as Bourges, when the viscount of that town sold out to him in 1101 in order to go to the Holy Land. It was a decided step in advance when the energetic and warlike Louis VI (1108-1137) took the donjons of the cas- tellans in the neighborhood of Paris, who had Reign been making the Capetian kings so much trouble, of Louis But this was accomplishing only what many feudal lords had achieved already ; namely, the bringing of a comparatively small and compact territory directly under their control. However, Louis was also powerful enough to undertake an expedition as far south as Clermont- Farrand in order to punish the Count of Auvergne for having injured the Church ; and even the powerful Duke of Aquitaine de- cided that it would be best to render homage, when he saw the size of Louis's army. The Abbot Suger was the right- hand man of Louis VI and of his successor, and kept down
