Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou

Geoffrey inherited Anjou and Maine in 1129 at fifteen, then married Empress Matilda, daughter of England's Henry I. The union was political arithmetic: her claim to England, his military skill. By 1144 he'd fought his way to control of Normandy. He never ruled England, but their son Henry II did, launching three centuries of Plantagenet kings. The dynasty took its name from Geoffrey's nickname — "Plantagenet" — decades after his death in 1151. His ancestral Anjou also gave historians the term for the sprawling Angevin Empire that followed.