Blessed Charles the Good

Blessed Charles the Good, son of Saint Canute, king of Denmark, was count of Flanders. The Roman Martyrology calls him a guardian of justice and a defender of the poor. He was murdered while at prayer in the church of Saint Donatian in Bruges. The Church commemorates him as a martyr on March 2.

He was born in Denmark in the first half of the 1080s; the exact date is not known. His mother was Adela, daughter of Robert I the Frisian, count of Flanders. In 1086 King Canute was killed in the church of Saint Alban in Odense, and the queen fled with her small son to Flanders, to her father’s court. When a few years later she married again and left for Italy, Charles remained in Flanders.

As a young knight he went to Jerusalem to visit the Holy Sepulchre, and for some time he fought in the Holy Land. After his return he served as counselor to his cousin, Count Baldwin VII, who had no children and named him his successor. About 1118 Charles married Margaret of Clermont; their marriage remained childless. In 1119 he took up the rule of Flanders, though he first had to overcome his opponents.

As count he worked above all for peace. He restored respect for the law, forbade the carrying of weapons in towns and marketplaces, and defended the Church and the poor. The chronicler Galbert, a notary of Bruges, recorded that Charles was offered the crown of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and, after the death of Emperor Henry V, the imperial crown as well. The count declined, because he did not want to leave Flanders.

When famine struck Flanders in 1125, Charles fed a hundred poor people in Bruges every day, and did the same in his other towns. According to Walter of Thérouanne, the author of his Life, he gave out seven thousand eight hundred loaves of bread at Ypres in a single day. He forbade the brewing of beer so that the grain would go for bread, and he ordered part of the fields to be sown with peas and beans, which ripen sooner. According to tradition, he also forced speculators to sell the grain they had stored up at a fair price.

The greatest influence in Bruges at that time belonged to the Erembald family, whose head was Bertulf, provost of the chapter of Saint Donatian and chancellor of Flanders. The count maintained that this family was descended from unfree people, which threatened it with the loss of its offices, and he punished the provost’s nephew, Borsiard, for his plundering by having his house burned down. A conspiracy was then formed. At dawn on March 2, 1127, Charles gave alms as he did every day and went to the church of Saint Donatian. He was reciting the psalms and holding out his hand with coins for the poor when Borsiard and his men killed him with their swords.

The crime, committed in a church during Lent, shook Flanders. The murderers were besieged in Bruges, and Louis VI, king of France, punished the guilty. Charles was buried in the church of Saint Donatian, and from the beginning the people venerated him as a martyr. That church was demolished at the turn of the nineteenth century, and his relics now rest in the Cathedral of the Holy Savior in Bruges. Pope Leo XIII confirmed his cult in 1882.