Person:Eudes II de Blois (1)

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Odo II (983 – 15 November 1037) was the count of Blois, Chartres, Châteaudun, Beauvais and Tours from 1004 and count of Troyes (as Odo IV) and Meaux (as Odo I) from 1022. He twice tried to make himself a king: first in Italy after 1024 and then in Burgundy after 1032.

Odo II was the son of Odo I of Blois and Bertha of Burgundy. He was the first to unite Blois and Champagne under one authority although his career was spent in endless feudal warfare with his neighbors and suzerains, many of whose territories he tried to annex.

About 1003/1004 he married Maud, a daughter of Richard I of Normandy. After her death in 1005,^[1] and as she had no children, Richard II of Normandy demanded a return of her dowry: half the county of Dreux. Odo refused and the two warred over the matter.^[2] Finally, King Robert II, who had married Odo's mother, imposed his arbitration on the contestants in 1007, leaving Odo in possession of the castle Dreux while Richard II kept the remainder of the lands.^[2] Odo quickly married a second wife, Ermengarde, daughter of .^[2]

Defeated by Fulk III of Anjou and Herbert I of Maine at the Battle of Pontlevoy in July 1016, he quickly tried to overrun the Touraine.^[3] After the death of his cousin Stephen I in 1019/1020, without heirs he seized Troyes, Meaux and all of Champagne for himself without royal approval. From there he attacked Ebles, the archbishop of Reims, and Theodoric I, Duke of Lorraine. Due to an alliance between the king and the Emperor Henry II he was forced to relinquish the county of Rheims to the archbishop.

He was offered the crown of Italy by the Lombard barons, but the offer was quickly retracted in order not to upset relations with the king of France. In 1032, he invaded the Kingdom of Burgundy on the death of Rudolph III. He retreated in the face of a coalition of the Emperor Conrad II and the new king of France, Henry I. In 1037 he took advantage of Conrad II's absence in Italy to invade the Duchy of Lorraine, but he died in the rout after being defeated by the forces of Gothelo I, Duke of Lorraine, in the Battle of Bar-le-Duc.

1.   Odo II, Count of Blois, in Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia.
2.   Frederick Lewis Weis. Ancestral Roots of Certain American Colonists Who Came to America bef 1760. (Name: 7th ed Genealogical Publishing, Baltimore 1992;)
   line 39 pp 42-43.

   Eudes II Ct de Blois, no parents

3.   Eudes II de Blois, Comte de Blois, in Lundy, Darryl. The Peerage: A genealogical survey of the peerage of Britain as well as the royal families of Europe.
4.   EUDES de Blois, son of EUDES I Comte de Blois & his wife Berthe de Bourgogne, in Cawley, Charles. Medieval Lands: A prosopography of medieval European noble and royal families.
5. ↑ ^{5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5} Biographie en Wikipédia FR, in Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia
   [[1]], trouvée 2016.

   Eudes II de Blois1 dit Eudes le Champenois (v. 983 – 15 novembre 1037 tué dans une bataille à Commercy), fut comte de Blois, de Châteaudun, de Chartres, de Reims, de Tours, de Beauvais, de Provins et de Sancerre à partir de 1004 et comte de Troyes et de Meaux à partir de 1022.
   Fils du comte Eudes Ier de Blois et de Berthe de Bourgogne, il succède au titre de comte de Blois à son frère aîné Thibaut II mort en 1004.