Eleanor of Aquitaine

Eleanor was born in 1124, most likely in or near Poitiers, the seat of the counts of Poitou and dukes of Aquitaine ^[1]. Her father, Duke William X, ruled a territory that stretched from the Loire to the Pyrenees, larger and richer than the royal domain of the French kings to whom the dukes owed nominal homage. Her grandfather, William IX, is remembered as the earliest troubadour whose songs survive, and the ducal court at Poitiers had a reputation for poetry, music, and a worldliness unusual for its time ^[2].

Her education reflected that setting. Eleanor learned to read, spoke the langue d'oc of the south alongside the northern French of the royal court, and was trained in the management of estates and households ^[1]. When her only brother died young, she became the heir to Aquitaine, Poitou, and Gascony, a prospect that made her the most sought-after bride in Europe.

Duke William X died suddenly in April 1137 while on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, leaving the thirteen-year-old Eleanor as Duchess of Aquitaine in her own right ^[3]. On his deathbed he had placed her under the protection of his overlord, King Louis VI of France, who moved quickly. Within three months Eleanor was married at Bordeaux to the king's son and heir, the sixteen-year-old Louis. Days later the old king died, and the young couple were crowned as Louis VII and Queen Eleanor of France ^[3].

The marriage joined the French crown to the vast southern duchy, at least on parchment. In practice Aquitaine remained Eleanor's inheritance, held separately rather than absorbed into the royal domain, a distinction that would matter enormously later ^[3]. At the Paris court the new queen stood out. Chroniclers, most of them monks with little sympathy for her, described her as beautiful, strong-willed, and fond of luxury, while Louis, raised for the church before his elder brother's death, was pious and austere ^[2].

Eleanor's influence on royal policy drew criticism. Contemporaries blamed her, fairly or not, for encouraging Louis's disastrous campaign against Champagne in the early 1140s, which culminated in the burning of the town of Vitry with heavy loss of life ^[1]. Whatever her role, the episode weighed on the king's conscience and helped push him toward crusade as an act of penance.

When Louis took the cross for the Second Crusade in 1146, Eleanor took it as well, and in 1147 she traveled with the army across Europe to Constantinople and on into Anatolia and the Latin states of the East ^[4]. She is one of the few medieval queens known to have accompanied a crusading army in person, which is why later records describe her simply as a female crusader. The expedition went badly. The army suffered severe losses crossing Asia Minor, and at Antioch in 1148 Eleanor quarreled openly with Louis, siding with her uncle Raymond, Prince of Antioch, who wanted the crusaders to attack Aleppo rather than march on to Jerusalem ^[4]. Louis compelled her to leave Antioch with him, and rumors about the queen's conduct, never substantiated, followed her for the rest of her life.

The crusade wrecked the marriage. On the return journey the royal couple traveled separately, and although Pope Eugenius III personally attempted a reconciliation at Tusculum in 1149, the breach only widened ^[3]. Eleanor had given Louis two daughters, Marie and Alix, but no son, and in a kingdom that expected male succession this failure gave both parties a respectable exit. In March 1152 a council of French bishops at Beaugency annulled the marriage on grounds of consanguinity, the standard legal instrument of the age, since Louis and Eleanor were related within the degrees the church prohibited ^[1].

Eleanor recovered her duchy in full and immediately became a target. Two ambitious lords reportedly tried to seize and marry her as she traveled home to Poitiers ^[2]. She evaded them and made her own choice. In May 1152, barely eight weeks after the annulment, she married Henry Plantagenet, Count of Anjou and Duke of Normandy, a man some eleven years her junior ^[3].

The match transformed the political map of Europe. When Henry won the English crown in 1154 as Henry II, he and Eleanor together controlled England, Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and Aquitaine, an assemblage historians call the Angevin empire, which dwarfed the lands governed directly by the king of France ^[5]. Louis VII, who had let the greatest heiress in Europe slip away, spent the rest of his reign contending with the consequences.

Anyone asking who was Eleanor of Aquitaine at the height of her power should look at the two decades after 1154. As Queen of England she crossed the Channel repeatedly, issued charters, and acted as regent during Henry's frequent absences on the continent ^[5]. She also bore him eight children in fourteen years: William, who died young, Henry, Matilda, Richard, Geoffrey, Eleanor, Joanna, and John. Through her daughters' marriages her descendants sat on thrones from Castile to Sicily, which is why later writers called her a grandmother of Europe ^[1].

By the late 1160s the marriage had cooled, strained by Henry's infidelities and by disputes over the government of her duchy. Around 1168 Eleanor established herself at Poitiers, ruling Aquitaine in association with her favorite son, Richard, who was formally installed as her heir there ^[3]. Her court became a center of patronage. Poets and writers, including figures associated with the troubadour tradition, found audiences in her circle, and her daughter Marie de Champagne patronized Chrétien de Troyes, the great romance writer of the age ^[2].

A popular legend holds that Eleanor and Marie presided over formal courts of love at Poitiers, judging questions of romance according to a code of courtly conduct. The story rests on a single satirical treatise by Andreas Capellanus written years later, and most modern scholars treat it as literary invention rather than documented fact ^[6]. What is certain is that Eleanor governed a real duchy with real revenues, and that she did so with considerable independence from her husband.

In 1173 the Angevin family tore itself apart. Henry the Young King, crowned as his father's associate but denied real power, rebelled against Henry II with the backing of Louis VII of France. His brothers Richard and Geoffrey joined him, and contemporaries believed Eleanor had encouraged her sons to rise against their father ^[5]. It was an extraordinary act for a medieval queen, and it failed. Eleanor was captured while trying to reach the French court, reportedly disguised in men's clothing, and Henry placed her in confinement ^[3].

She remained a prisoner, held mainly at Sarum and other English castles, for roughly sixteen years ^[1]. Her captivity was honorable rather than harsh: she kept servants and an allowance, and Henry occasionally released her for ceremonial occasions, including Christmas courts. But she had no political freedom, and she watched from confinement as her son Henry the Young King died in 1183 and Geoffrey died in 1186.

Henry II died in July 1189, defeated in his final war by Richard, who was allied with Philip II of France. One of Richard's first commands as king was the release of his mother. Eleanor, now about sixty-five, emerged from custody with her energy intact and immediately began administering England in her son's name until he arrived for his coronation ^[5].

The final fifteen years of Eleanor's life were among her most active, a fact that surprises many readers of any Eleanor of Aquitaine biography. When Richard I left on the Third Crusade in 1190, she helped hold his realms together. She traveled across the Alps and Pyrenees in winter to escort his bride, Berengaria of Navarre, to Sicily, an arduous journey for a woman near seventy ^[3]. When Richard was captured on his way home and held by Emperor Henry VI, Eleanor took charge of raising the enormous ransom of 150,000 marks, levying taxes on England, and in 1194 she personally delivered the money in Germany and brought her son home ^[5].

After Richard died of a wound at Chalus in April 1199, Eleanor moved to secure the succession of her youngest son, John, against the rival claim of her grandson Arthur of Brittany. Though in her mid-seventies, she toured Aquitaine to receive the homage of its lords and performed homage to Philip II of France for her own lands, shielding the duchy from confiscation ^[1]. In 1200 she made one final long journey, crossing the Pyrenees to Castile to select her granddaughter Blanche as a bride for the heir to the French throne, a match intended to seal peace between the kingdoms ^[3]. Blanche of Castile would later rule France as regent and raise Louis IX, the future Saint Louis.

In 1202 Eleanor was besieged at Mirebeau by forces supporting Arthur, and John's rapid march to rescue her produced his one striking military success ^[5]. Afterwards she withdrew to the abbey of Fontevraud, where she took the veil. She died on April 1, 1204, aged about eighty, and was buried at Fontevraud beside Henry II and Richard I ^[1].

Eleanor of Aquitaine's achievements are unusual by any measure: duchess in her own right for sixty-seven years, queen of France for fifteen, queen of England for thirty-five, crusader, regent, and matriarch of a dynasty. Her tomb effigy at Fontevraud Abbey shows her reading a book, an image of learning and composure that has shaped her memory ever since ^[7]. Two of her sons ruled England, and through her daughters and granddaughters her blood ran through most of the royal houses of medieval Europe ^[1].

Her reputation has swung between extremes. Medieval chroniclers, unsettled by a woman who chose her husbands, rode on crusade, and rebelled against a king, filled the gaps in the record with rumor, some of which hardened into legend, including the false tale that she murdered Henry's mistress Rosamund Clifford ^[6]. Modern historians, working from charters and administrative records, have recovered a more grounded figure: a capable ruler and administrator whose interventions repeatedly steadied the Angevin state ^[5].

Among basic Eleanor of Aquitaine facts, perhaps the most telling is longevity in power. She outlived two husbands, eight of her ten children, and nearly every rival of her generation, and she was still conducting diplomacy across mountain ranges in her late seventies. Writers, dramatists, and filmmakers have returned to her ever since, most famously in James Goldman's play The Lion in Winter and its 1968 film, in which Katharine Hepburn's portrayal won an Academy Award ^[7]. Few figures of the Middle Ages remain so vividly present.