Little is known to us of the first Capetian kings. Their unimportance was such that contemporaries scarcely think it worth while to mention them. Robert the Pious is the only one of them who has found a biographer, in Helgaud, a monk of St-Benoît-sur-Loire, but he is so artless and indeed so childish a biographer, so reverential an admirer of the very pious and gentle king, so little acquainted with affairs, that his panegyric has very little value for the historian. He paints his hero for us as tall, broad-shouldered, with well-combed hair and thick beard, with eyes lowered and mouth "well-formed to give the kiss of peace," and at the same time of kingly mien when he wore his crown. Learned, disdainful of ostentation, so charitable as to let himself be robbed without protest by the beggars, spending his days in devotion, a model of all the Christian virtues, so much beloved of God that he was able to restore sight to a blind man, such, if we may believe him, was good King Robert, he for whom posterity has for these reasons give the name of the "Pious."
It is hardly necessary to say that this portrait can only have had a distant relation to reality. Doubtless, Robert was a learned king, educated at the episcopal school of Rheims while it was under Gerbert's direction, he knew Latin, loved books, and carried them with him on his journeys. As with all the learned men of the day his knowledge was chiefly theological. He loved church matters, and in 996 the Bishop of Laon, Asselin, could derisively suggest that he should be made a bishop "since he had so sweet a voice."
But the pious king, who was not afraid to persist in the face of anathemas when passion raised its voice in him, who did not hesitate to set fire to monasteries when they hindered his conquests, was a man of action too. All his efforts were directed towards the extension of his domain, and it may be said that he let no opportunity slip of claiming and, when possible, occupying any fiefs which fell vacant or were disputed. This was the case with Dreux, which his father, as we have seen, had been forced to bestow on Odo I, Count of Chartres, and which Robert succeeded in re-occupying about 1015; it was also the case with Melun, which Hugh Capet had granted as a fief to the Count of Vendôme, Bouchard the Venerable, and of which Robert took possession on the death (1016) of Bouchard's successor, Reginald, Bishop of Paris. Some years later (circa 1022), when it chanced that Stephen, Count of Troyes, died without children, Robert energetically pushed his claims to the inheritance against Odo II, Count of Blois, who, apparently, had up till then been co-owner, on an equal footing with the deceased count. He did not hesitate to enter upon a struggle with this formidable vassal which, no doubt, would have lasted long if other political considerations had not led the king to yield the point.
It was above all at the time of the conquest of the Duchy of Burgundy that Robert could give proof the full extent of his energy and
