Eleanor of Aquitaine

Queen of France (r. 1137-1180) and queen of England (r. 1154-1189)

• Born: c. 1122
• Birthplace: Either at Bordeaux or at the nearby castle of Belin, southern France
• Died: April 1, 1204
• Place of death: The Abbey of Fontevrault, Anjou, France

As queen of France, queen of England, and mother of two English kings, Eleanor of Aquitaine was probably the most powerful woman of her time. In addition, she promoted the literary and social style of courtly love and of the troubadours.

Early Life

The first important influence on the childhood of Eleanor of Aquitaine (EHL-eh-nohr uhv Ar-kwih-tehn) was William IX, her grandfather. He was the earliest troubadour known by name and ruled Aquitaine and Poitou from 1086 to 1127. Though he was known for a scandalous private life and his defiance of the Church, he maintained control over his quarrelsome vassals and passed down to William X and ultimately to Eleanor a considerable inheritance. William X, Eleanor’s father, was also a cultured man and a patron of poets and troubadours, though enormously quarrelsome and disrespectful of the Church.

Eleanor’s mother, Aénor, who died when Eleanor was eight, was the daughter of the notorious Dangerosa, the wife to the viscount of Chatellerault, and the mistress to Eleanor’s grandfather. William X was fond of Eleanor, his eldest child, and took her with him wherever he went. Medieval rulers could not reside quietly at some central castle. To maintain control over their vassals and administer justice throughout the land, they were almost always on the move from one residence to another.

Eleanor’s education was not confined to women’s arts such as needlework. She learned to read and write Latin, unusual accomplishments for a layperson, and probably to speak it as well. She also learned to read and write Provençal, the language of the lyric poetry of the troubadours. Eleanor herself became the inspiration of much troubadour poetry.

When Duke William X died in 1137, his daughter, under feudal law, automatically became the ward of the French king Louis VI. She did inherit her father’s fief and the homage of his vassals, but she was vulnerable to seizure by any powerful suitor who could forcibly marry her and enjoy her inheritance. Louis VI hastened to betroth her, therefore, to his only surviving son. Even before they were actually married, the monarch made his son, then sixteen years old, claim Poitiers and Aquitaine and receive the homage of Eleanor’s vassals. At age fifteen, Eleanor became the bride of the young man destined to be Louis VII . The bridegroom had a much less worldly upbringing than Eleanor, having been destined from earliest childhood to be a monk. Only the accidental death of his older brother, the crown prince, brought the “child monk” out of the monastery of Saint-Denis.

Chroniclers agree that the young prince was appropriately smitten with adoration for this tall, beautiful girl who already carried herself like a queen. Even writers who did not always approve of her worldly tastes agreed that she was strikingly beautiful, with a superb figure, fine features, and lustrous eyes. On July 25, 1137, Louis and Eleanor were married in the cathedral of Saint André at Bordeaux in the presence of many lords and church dignitaries. A few days later, on August 8, they were consecrated duke and duchess of Aquitaine in the cathedral at Poitiers. During the banquet that followed, the abbot Suger, who was a trusted counselor to both King Louis VI and his son, brought the news that the king had died. Young Eleanor was crowned queen of France on Christmas Day, 1137.

Life’s Work

Eleanor apparently enjoyed the next few years of married life, making her court the most splendid in Western Christendom. She filled it with troubadours from southern France and trouvères (court poets), their northern counterparts, who wrote not only love songs but also the epic chansons de geste (songs of deeds). In spite of his savage temper, Louis VII became known for his honesty and generosity and extended royal authority in France by issuing charters to the towns.

In 1147, Eleanor accompanied her husband on the Second Crusade . Edessa had fallen to the Saracens in 1144 and Christendom feared that the Holy Land might be lost, after having been won from the infidels at such great cost only a generation before. After attempting an overland trip through Bavaria, Hungary, and the Balkans, Eleanor and Louis were royally entertained in Constantinople by Emperor Manuel I Comnenus. The refinements of ancient Greece and Rome were still in evidence in Constantinople, as well as the luxuries of the East: Asian silks, Russian furs, and Persian carpets. This experience, combined with the royal reception later in the Latin principality of Antioch, where her uncle Raymond of Poitiers was their host, confirmed Eleanor’s taste for Byzantine splendor.

The actual contact with the Saracens, however, and some of the dreadful effects of weather were not so pleasant. Emperor Manuel had reported that the German emperor Conrad III , whose Crusaders had preceded Louis, had already successfully engaged the Turks. Louis, wishing to share in such a triumph, moved hurriedly into dangerous territory. There he found that Conrad had actually suffered a disastrous defeat.

Louis and his band met with little better luck. On Christmas Day, heavy rains and floods destroyed their tents and baggage, and many horses and men were drowned. Soon after, the Saracens began to attack, shooting arrows from the saddle, then racing in with sabers. At Attalis, Louis abandoned the infantry and the pilgrims to proceed as best they could, while he and his horsemen and Eleanor took to ships. They made a stormy crossing to Saint Symeon, where Eleanor became fast friends with her uncle Raymond, the prince of Antioch.

Here Louis and Eleanor had a serious quarrel that was never to be entirely healed. Eleanor passionately supported Raymond in a plan to use the French troops to attack the Saracen strongholds and win back Edessa. Louis resented this proposal and asserted that he was leaving for Jerusalem and that his wife had to come with him. Eleanor refused, saying that she wanted their marriage annulled on grounds of consanguinity that is, that they were too closely related. This was the favorite way of getting out of marriages among royalty in medieval times, as it avoided the stigma and complication of divorce. Louis left in the middle of the night and had his men abduct Eleanor from her quarters to accompany him.

Louis and Eleanor did reach Jerusalem, where they were royally welcomed by King Baldwin III. Louis joined an unwise expedition against Damascus, which had been a friendly Saracen city. This move ended in disaster and retreat. After Easter, 1149, Louis and Eleanor left for home by sea on separate ships. Eleanor’s ship was captured once by Greeks but was liberated again by King Roger of Sicily.

Back in Paris at last, Louis and Eleanor quarreled, in spite of the efforts of both Pope Eugene III and Abbot Suger to reconcile them. On March 21, 1152, the marriage was pronounced null and void on the grounds of their being third cousins. The fact that Eleanor had borne only daughters (Marie and Alice) may have been the final motivation for Louis at last to take this step. Eleanor was again a desirable heiress, but she was also again in danger of seizure and forced marriage by ambitious suitors. She hastened to forestall this possibility by promoting a speedy alliance with Henry II. They were married on May 18, 1152, only eight weeks after her annulment.

Since his father had died, Henry was master of Normandy, Maine, Anjou, and Touraine already and might acquire England as well. He was a man of enormous energy, both physical and mental, a tireless horseman, unusually well educated, a master of languages, a good lover altogether a more aggressive and formidable husband than Louis had ever been.

Henry soon went to England, while Eleanor held court in Angers, the capital of Anjou. She gave birth there to her first son, William. She also became a patron of Bernart de Ventadour, one of the most famous of the medieval troubadours. Meanwhile, Henry in England had forced King Stephen to name him as heir.

When Stephen died, the archbishop of Canterbury crowned Henry and Eleanor king and queen of England, on December 19, 1154. Henry was a vigorous monarch, restoring order in a land long dominated by robber barons who hired mercenaries to terrorize the countryside. Within three months, practically all mercenaries had left England and a thousand robber fortresses had been destroyed. He created new institutions, issued new silver coinage, reformed the law, and generally brought order out of social chaos. Henry also named as his chancellor a brilliant young man named Thomas Becket.

There was one thing Henry did not do as well as Louis: He did not share his executive functions with Eleanor. For some time, Eleanor was busy bearing his children. The first child, William, died when he was three years old, but Eleanor had four more sons Henry, Richard, Geoffrey, and John and three daughters Matilda, Eleanor, and Joanne. After the birth of John, her last child, in 1167, Eleanor regained her strength and her energy to pursue some kind of political power of her own.

The king, who was having a long affair with Rosamund Clifford, was anxious to keep Eleanor out of England and decided that she would be useful in Aquitaine, which was restless and rebellious. Eleanor regained some degree of freedom to manage her own court, installing herself in Poitiers. Again, she reigned over a glittering court of poets and troubadours, including her old admirer Bernart de Ventadour, as well as Bertran de Born. Eleanor herself and sometimes her eldest daughter (by Louis), Marie of Champagne, presided over romantic song contests. The stylized games of courtly love attained their fullest expression there.

Henry’s prestige and reputation in Christendom suffered a severe blow when four of Henry’s knights murdered Thomas Becket, then archbishop of Canterbury, before his altar. The revolt of 1173 against Henry was a combined plot involving Eleanor and three of her sons, aided by Louis of France. Many other men throughout the king’s territories were tired of his heavy-handed rule. Especially in Aquitaine, he was considered a tyrant. The plot to depose him might have been successful had not the young Henry lost his nerve and fled to King Louis VII.

Thus alerted, Henry reestablished his power with a series of swift and lucky strokes, repelling a French force that was invading Normandy, destroying Breton rebels before they could cross into England, capturing the king of the Scots who harassed the northern border, and even seizing the fifty-year-old Eleanor, disguised as a nobleman riding toward Paris. Eleanor was imprisoned thereafter in one of her husband’s castles until Henry’s death fifteen years later.

Henry II had been generous in making peace with his sons. When young Henry, the crown prince, died of dysentery, Henry made Richard his heir. Nevertheless, quarreling continued between Richard and John and their father. When Henry did not concede to Richard’s demands, Richard made an alliance with Philip II, by then king of France. Henry, deathly ill of blood poisoning, capitulated to the combined forces of Richard and Philip II and died a bitter man.

In her old age, Eleanor showed herself to be an executive and diplomat of rare power. When Jerusalem had again fallen into infidel hands in 1187, King Richard I hastened to launch another crusade. While he was gone, Eleanor was kept busy protecting the realm from the ambitions of her son John in England and Philip II, who was trying to invade Normandy. When Richard was shipwrecked and held for ransom by King Henry VI of Hohenstaufen, Eleanor herself raised the 100,000 marks and went to Germany to ransom her son.

When her beloved Richard died in 1199, more dreary work remained for Eleanor, a losing battle to exercise some control over her least favored son John, now king. She died on April 1, 1204, at the Abbey of Fontevrault. The Angevin Empire died with her, for King John could not hold the vast inheritance from his father.

Significance

Eleanor of Aquitaine lived and participated actively in that age of artistic and intellectual awakening sometimes called the twelfth century renaissance. The literary aspects of that renaissance began in the Poitou-Aquitaine region of southern France early in the century. The intellectual ferment that was to result in new theological thought, new economic and political theories, and innovations in architecture, art, music, and poetry centered later at the University of Paris and the royal courts of France and England. New knowledge brought back by Crusaders, including the adventurous Eleanor herself, also encouraged new attitudes.

Eleanor successfully defied the conventional expectations about women in that era. Whatever enemies she made in her long career as a queen and the mother of kings, she retained the loyalty of Aquitaine through the political turmoil of a lifetime.

Plantagenet Kings of England, 1154-1399

Reign

• Monarch

1154-1189

• Henry II (with Eleanor of Aquitaine, r. 1154-1189)

1189-1199

• Richard I the Lion-Hearted

1199-1216

• John I Lackland

1216-1272

• Henry III

1272-1307

• Edward I Longshanks

1307-1327

• Edward II (with Isabella of France, r. 1308-1330)

1327-1377

• Edward III (with Philippa of Hainaut, r. 1327-1369)

1377-1399

• Richard II

Bibliography

Andreas, Capellanus. The Art of Courtly Love. Translated by John Jay Parry. 1941. Reprint. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Andreas, known as the chaplain, set down a code of manners for court life. This text is a curious reversal of Ovid’s instructions on how to seduce women. Here, however, woman is the mistress, man her pupil in homage, her vassal in service.

Burns, Jane E. “Courtly Love: Who Needs It? Recent Feminist Work in the Medieval French Tradition.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture in Society 27, no. 1 (Autumn, 2001): 23-57. Surveys feminist and other writings on the role of female protagonists in “reshaping” and “remapping” the courtly love tradition, the conditions of love itself, gender expression, and sexuality.

Kelly, Amy. Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978. A detailed and well-written biography.

Kibler, William W., ed. Eleanor of Aquitaine: Patron and Politician. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976. A collection of papers from distinguished medieval scholars on the significance of Eleanor within her own and subsequent centuries.

Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Although this classic work, originally published in 1936, contains no specific information about Eleanor, it provides a detailed discussion of the tradition of courtly love and its significant impact on later literature and popular thought.

Lewis, C. S. Eleanor of Aquitaine. Translated by Peter Wiles. New York: Coward-McCann, 1968. An authoritative and admirable biography of Eleanor. In the original French, this work won the Pris Historia in 1966.

Rorem, Paul. “The Company of Medieval Women Theologians.” Theology Today 60, no. 1 (April, 2003): 82-93. Argues that the tradition of women theologians during the Middle Ages included a vast “company” of religious practitioners and activists and not a company made up of those who were merely contemplating. The author notes the final years of Eleanor’s life, when she was in residence at the abbey at Fontevrault.

Rougemont, Denis de. Love in the Western World. 1956. Reprint. Translated by Montgomery Belgion. New York: Schocken Books, 1990. This is a classic work on the meaning of love in Western civilization, including the radical change that started among the troubadours of southern France in the time of Eleanor.

Warner, Marina. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: Vintage Books, 1983. Good for background information about the view of women in the Middle Ages, though courtly love, as practiced in Eleanor’s famous courts of love, had only a very remote connection to the cult of the Virgin.

Wheeler, Bonnie, and John Carmi Parsons, eds. Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. A study of more than five hundred pages (with a sixty page bibliography), discussing topics such as Eleanor’s positions in the government of her reigning sons, a comparison of Eleanor with other noblewomen of the time, and divorce and canon law.