He rewarded the fidelity of Herbert of Le Mans, whose aid saved him from utter ruin, by entrapping him into captivity and robbing him of his lands.

He secured the terrified friendship of the French king by despatching twelve assassins to cut down before his eyes the minister who had troubled it.

Familiar as the age was with treason and rapine and blood, it recoiled from the cool cynicism of his crimes, and believed the wrath of Heaven to have been revealed against the union of the worst forms of evil in Fulk the Black.

But neither the wrath of Heaven nor the curses of men broke with a single mishap the fifty years of his success.
At his accession in 987 Anjou was the least important of the greater provinces of France.

At his death in 1040 it stood, if not in extent, at least in real power, first among them all.