Eleanor of Aquitaine

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Eleanor of Aquitaine

1122-1204
Queen of France and England

Eleanor’s Inheritance. The life of Eleanor of Aquitaine illustrates how the clever manipulation of family ties could enhance an aristocrat’s power in the Middle Ages. Although the several regions of twelfth-century France were nominally bound to the Capetian monarch in Paris, all but a few of the king’s vassals ruled their lands independently. The succession of the dukes of Aquitaine, the largest and most powerful of these regions, was therefore of great importance to the political balance of Western Europe. When William X of Aquitaine died in 1137 without a surviving male heir, his fifteen-year-old

daughter, Eleanor, inherited the duchy, thus beginning her career as one of the most politically influential women of the Middle Ages.

Queen of France. On his deathbed Eleanor’s father had entrusted her to the protection of King Louis VI, who promptly betrothed her to his son, the future Louis VII. When the elder Louis died in 1137, just a few days after the wedding, the teenaged Eleanor and Louis were crowned monarchs of a newly strengthened French kingdom. The temperament of the quiet and devout new king contrasted with that of his fiery wife, who had spent the last ten years not in a cloister, like her husband, but at the side of her well-traveled and worldly father. Louis VII was deeply impressed with Eleanor’s beauty and intelligence, and, since the young and inexperienced king was only a year older than his new queen, it was natural that she was able to exert great influence over him during the early years of his reign.

The Second Crusade. In 1147, responding to a papal bull encouraging France to defend Crusader holdings in the Holy Land, Louis VII traveled east to take part in the largely unsuccessful campaign now known as the Second Crusade. Eleanor, unwilling to be excluded from her husband’s affairs, insisted on going with him. The French company was met in Antioch by Eleanor’s charismatic uncle, Raymond of Poitiers, and, whether justified or not, rumors began to circulate that Raymond and Eleanor were having an affair. When a dispute between Raymond and Louis broke out, with Louis deciding to press on to Jerusalem rather than defend Antioch, Eleanor demanded that their marriage be annulled. Tensions between the French king and queen had existed even before this crusade, owing in part to the couple’s infertility: Eleanor had borne only one child, a daughter, in their first ten years of marriage. Eleanor was doubtless as unhappy as her husband about their lack of a male heir, since controlling a son would have been the surest way for her to secure her political influence. Then there were the temperamental differences between the two; Eleanor is said to have complained, “I married a monk, not a king.” Whatever the causes of their strife, by the time the two left for home in 1149—on separate ships—the dissolution of their marriage seemed inevitable. Divorce, of course, was not a canonical possibility, but annulments especially among the aristocracy were quite common in the Middle Ages. It had long been rumored that Eleanor and Louis were connected by distant ancestry, and their kinship in the fourth and fifth degrees was sufficient to allow an annulment on grounds of consanguinity. After an unsuccessful attempt at reconciliation following their return to France, Eleanor and Louis were finally separated in 1152.

Queen of England. After her virtual divorce from Louis VII, Eleanor regained control over her lands. Within two months she had secured a new alliance for Aquitaine with her marriage to Henry Plantagenet, who was not only lord of Normandy and Anjou in France but heir to the English throne. After the death of King Stephen in 1154, Eleanor and Henry II united their realms, becoming monarchs of the most powerful kingdom in western Christendom. Though her new husband was twelve years younger, Eleanor was not able to control him to the extent she had Louis VII. Eleanor’s resentment grew when Henry II began an open affair with the well-known beauty Rosamond, daughter of one of his knights. In early 1168 Eleanor, with her husband’s permission, left England and Normandy to establish a court at Poitiers.

Patroness of Art and Love. For at least two generations Eleanor’s family had been great patrons of the arts; her grandfather, himself a poet and musician, had been styled William “the Troubadour.” Eleanor carried on this tradition at Poitiers, which during these years became a meeting place for many of the greatest writers and troubadours of the twelfth century, including Bernart de Ventadour, Chretien de Troyes, Bertran de Born, and perhaps even Marie de France. Eleanor’s first daughter, by Louis VII, Marie de Champagne—to whom Chretien dedicated his famous romance of Lancelot—is believed to have come to her mother’s court as well, and the two are credited with founding the “courts of love,” tribunals in which noble ladies ruled on questions of romantic love and courtly etiquette. The best-known description of courtly love is Andreas Capellanus’s De Arte Honeste Amandi (The Art of Noble Love, circa 1185), the second book of which was based directly on the rulings of Eleanor and her daughter while at Poitiers.

Unsuccessful Rebellion. In the years before her move to Poitiers, Eleanor had given birth to three daughters and five sons by Henry. All the daughters were eventually wed to powerful kings or nobles from as far abroad as Sicily and Bavaria. Eleanor encouraged their sons to revolt against their father in 1173-1174. After the rebellion was put down, Henry II had Eleanor sent to his castle in Touraine. Unable to move from place to place without his permission, she spent the next sixteen years of her life in confinement at various castles.

Kings Richard and John. By the time of his death in 1189, Henry had been forced to acknowledge his eldest living son, Richard, as heir. The next year, Richard, later dubbed “the Lion-Hearted,” left for the Third Crusade, naming his mother as regent. The sixty-eight-year-old queen mother defended her favorite son’s lands against his brother John, who was plotting with Richard’s former ally Philip of France to depose his elder brother. After Richard’s return home from the Crusade in 1194, Eleanor retired for a time to the abbey of Fontevrault but entered politics again at Richard’s death in 1199. She helped secure the succession of her youngest son, John, serving as a powerful adviser and diplomat throughout the early years of his reign. Even at her advanced age she traveled throughout Europe preparing treaties and arranging marriages for her remaining relatives. Active to the end, Eleanor of Aquitaine died at Fontevrault in the spring of 1204.