Blanche of Castile

Blanche was born on March 4, 1188 in Palencia, a cathedral town in the Kingdom of Castile, one of the many children of King Alfonso VIII of Castile and Eleanor of England ^[1]. Through her mother she was a granddaughter of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine, which placed her at the center of the dynastic web connecting the Plantagenet, Capetian, and Iberian royal houses. Any account of who was Blanche of Castile has to begin with that ancestry, because it determined the course of her life before she turned thirteen.

Her childhood at the Castilian court passed during a period of intense warfare between the Christian kingdoms of Spain and the Almohad caliphate. The court of Alfonso VIII was also a literary one, hospitable to troubadours and clerics, and Blanche grew up surrounded by books, music, and an assertive model of queenship in her own mother ^[2].

In 1200 the aged Eleanor of Aquitaine crossed the Pyrenees in person to collect a Castilian granddaughter as a bride for the French royal heir, a marriage required by the Treaty of Le Goulet between King John of England and Philip II Augustus of France. Tradition holds that Eleanor passed over Blanche's elder sister Urraca and selected Blanche instead ^[1]. On May 23, 1200, the twelve year old princess married Louis, the future Louis VIII, at Port-Mort in Normandy, since an interdict then in force prevented the ceremony from taking place on French soil ^[3].

For more than two decades Blanche was a princess in waiting at the Capetian court, bearing children and absorbing the workings of French government under her formidable father in law, Philip Augustus. Her most consequential child, the future Louis IX, was born at Poissy on April 25, 1214, one of twelve or thirteen children she bore, most of whom died young ^[2].

Her first taste of political action came through England rather than France. In 1216 rebel English barons offered the crown to her husband Louis, whose claim rested partly on Blanche's Plantagenet blood. When the invasion collapsed after the battle of Lincoln in 1217 and Philip Augustus declined to send further help, Blanche threw herself into raising money, men, and a relief fleet for her husband from the Channel ports ^[3]. The effort could not save the English adventure, but it revealed an energy and administrative grip that contemporaries remembered.

Louis VIII finally succeeded his father in 1223, making Blanche queen consort of France. The reign was short. Returning from a crusading campaign against the Albigensian heretics in the south, Louis fell ill and died at Montpensier on November 8, 1226, leaving a twelve year old heir. On his deathbed he entrusted the kingdom and the boy to Blanche, an arrangement confirmed when she was named regent, described in the documents as having the care and tutelage of the king and kingdom ^[1].

The regency of 1226 to 1234 was the proving ground of Blanche of Castile's achievements. A foreign born woman ruling for a child king struck many French barons as an opportunity, and a coalition formed around Peter Mauclerc, duke of Brittany, and Hugh of Lusignan, count of La Marche, with encouragement from Henry III of England ^[4]. Blanche moved faster than her enemies. She had Louis IX crowned at Reims within three weeks of his father's death, on November 29, 1226, denying the rebels the argument that France lacked an anointed king ^[1].

She then dismantled the opposition through a mix of arms and negotiation. In early 1227 she brought an army into the field and forced the coalition to terms at Vendôme, detaching key figures with grants and marriage alliances. When conspirators later plotted to seize the young king near Montlhéry, Blanche summoned the townspeople of Paris, who lined the road in arms to escort Louis safely into the city, a scene the king recalled with emotion for the rest of his life ^[4].

Her greatest diplomatic stroke came in April 1229 with the Treaty of Paris, sometimes called the Treaty of Meaux, which ended the long Albigensian Crusade. Count Raymond VII of Toulouse submitted, and the treaty arranged the marriage of his heiress Jeanne to Blanche's son Alphonse of Poitiers, a settlement that eventually brought the vast county of Toulouse into the royal domain ^[5]. In the same period she weathered the great strike of the University of Paris, which dispersed in 1229 after riots and returned only in 1231 under a papally brokered settlement ^[4].

Blanche's marriage to Louis VIII appears to have been close, and after his death she never remarried, wearing widow's dress for the remaining twenty six years of her life. Hostile pamphleteers during the baronial wars spread rumors linking her to the papal legate Romano Frangipani and to Count Theobald IV of Champagne, charges that historians treat as political slander rather than evidence ^[2].

Her relationship with Louis IX was the axis of her existence. She supervised his education personally, and Joinville, the king's biographer, reports Louis saying that his mother taught him to believe in God and would rather see him dead than guilty of mortal sin ^[6]. The bond had its frictions. After Louis married Margaret of Provence in 1234, a match Blanche herself had arranged, the queen mother guarded her influence jealously, and Joinville describes her keeping the young couple apart at court, an image that has colored her reputation ever since ^[6].

She was also a cultivated patron with genuine literary and musical interests. Manuscripts associated with her include lavish moralized Bibles, one of which contains a famous double portrait of Blanche enthroned beside the young Louis IX, now held at the Morgan Library in New York ^[7]. Blanche is one of the few medieval queens credited with composition in her own right: a surviving Old French song, a devotional piece addressed to the Virgin, is attributed to her in the chansonnier tradition, which is why modern catalogues list her as a composer as well as a regent ^[2].

Even after Louis IX assumed personal rule in the mid 1230s, Blanche remained his closest counselor, present in council and active in diplomacy. When the king took the cross after a near fatal illness in 1244, she opposed the venture, fearing for both her son and the kingdom, but once the decision stood she accepted the burden it implied ^[4].

In 1248 Louis departed on the Seventh Crusade to Egypt and left his mother, now aged sixty, as regent for the second time. She governed France for four difficult years, raising the enormous sums the expedition consumed, maintaining order, and managing the shock of the king's defeat and capture at Mansurah in 1250, after which she helped organize his ransom ^[5]. In 1251 a strange popular movement, the crusade of the Pastoureaux or Shepherds, swept through northern France claiming it would rescue the king. Blanche at first received its leaders, hoping to channel the enthusiasm, then ordered the movement suppressed when it turned to violence against clergy and Jews ^[4].

Her last recorded acts show her instincts intact. In 1252, when the chapter of Notre-Dame of Paris imprisoned peasant families from its estates in a dispute over dues, the aging regent rode to the prison herself and ordered the captives released ^[2]. She fell mortally ill soon afterward and died on November 27, 1252 at Melun, asking to be received as a nun of the Cistercian order on her deathbed. She was buried at Maubuisson, the abbey of Notre-Dame-la-Royale near Pontoise that she had founded in 1236, while her heart was given to her other Cistercian foundation, the abbey of Le Lys near Melun ^[1].

Any serious Blanche of Castile biography ends with a paradox: a queen remembered chiefly as a mother produced some of the most effective personal government of the entire Capetian era. Modern historians, notably her biographers Régine Pernoud and Lindy Grant, credit her regencies with preserving the monarchy at its most vulnerable moment and with completing the absorption of Languedoc that royal armies alone had failed to secure ^[5][2].

Her influence survived through her children. Louis IX, canonized in 1297, owed his celebrated piety and much of his political formation to her, and her daughter Isabelle, who founded the abbey of Longchamp, was later beatified. News of Blanche's death reached Louis in the Holy Land in 1253 and, according to Joinville, left him unable to speak to visitors for two days ^[6].

Among the enduring Blanche of Castile facts is her association with some of the most splendid art of thirteenth century France, from the moralized Bibles produced for the royal family to the rose windows of chartered churches whose glass carries the castles of Castile alongside the fleur de lis ^[7]. Centuries of historians, and generations of search engines fielding the question of what Blanche of Castile is famous for, return the same core answer: she was the woman who twice governed France, defeated its rebels, and raised a saint to rule it ^[1].