Charles the Good was the only son of King Canute IV of Denmark and his wife, Adela of Flanders. The young prince was not destined to be king, however. His father was slain in 1086, and Adela fled with her two year old son back to her native Flanders. There the little boy grew up in safety, and was wise enough to never try to take the blood-soaked throne of Denmark away from his kinsmen.
A sincerely devout and kind man, Charles was loyal subject of his uncle, Count Robert II, and a trusted advisor of his cousin, Robert’s son Baldwin VII. When Baldwin was wounded in battle, he named Charles as his successor to the county before dying of his injuries in the summer of 1119.
Charles kept the county from civil war between potential successors by “treating his opponents with great clemency” and assuring the safety of all. A modest an unambitious man, Charles turned down the offer to name him King of Jerusalem and refused to be a contender for crown of the Holy Roman Empire after the demise of Emperor Henry V. Instead, he devoted himself to taking care of the people of Flanders.
His devotion to his subjects became most apparent when famine hit Flanders. The brutally cold weather during winter in Northern Europe, coupled with hellishly sodden summers, caused failed harvests and increased bread prices for most of the 1120s, and the poor of Flanders would have starved to death without the intervention of their count. Charles “distributed bread to the poor, and took action to prevent grain from being hoarded and sold at excessively high prices” understanding that this price gouging was just as instrumental as a failed harvest for keeping bread out of the mouths of disadvantaged.
Alas, like many Christians of the time period, Charles thought all Jews were participating in the price gouging of grain, and expelled the whole Jewish community from Flanders in 1125.
Nothing can be said in defense of this anti-Semitic scapegoating, but at least Charles realized that price gouging was a favorite occupation of several well-to-do Christian families as well. He began proceedings against one of the main price gouging families, the Erembalds, threatening to reduce them to serfs for their crimes. In retaliation, Father Bertulf FitzErembald, the provost of St. Donatian’s Cathedral, “masterminded a conspiracy to assassinate Charles and his advisors.”
On Ash Wednesday of 1127, which fell on 2 March, Charles was kneeling in prayer at cathedral when “a group of knights answering to the Erembald family entered the church and hacked him to death with broadswords. The brutal and sacrilegious murder of the popular count provoked a massive public outrage, and he was almost immediately regarded popularly as a martyr and saint”.
We know a lot of details about the aftermath of his death, including the fact that the Erembalds “were arrested and tortured to death by the enraged nobles and commoners” to a book written about it by Galbert of Bruges. This book, The Murder, Betrayal, and Slaughter of the Glorious Charles, Count of Flanders, has been translated and reprinted almost nonstop since the Medieval period, and is available for free online. As well as being an account of Charles’s murder, it reveals scads of information about life in the Low Countries in the early 12th century.
Charles the Good was formally beatified in 1882 by one of my favorite popes, Pope Leo XIII. (He is famous for his 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum, in which he “outlined the rights of workers to a fair wage, safe working conditions, and the formation of labor unions, while affirming the rights of property and free enterprise, opposing both atheistic Marxism and laissez-faire capitalism.”) Charles was interred at the same cathedral in which he was murdered, and now his relics are part of the church’s holy treasures.
