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On this day in 1152: Eleanor of Aquitaine marries Henry II
Eleanor of Aquitaine was, without doubt, one of the most important royal figures in the medieval West. Heiress to vast lands, wife to two kings, and mother to five monarchs, she ruled with energy, a notable personality, and a firm grip of political affairs that single her out from the nobility of the High Middle Ages.
Eleanor (Aliénor) was born around 1122 to William X of Aquitaine, who owned more of France than the king of France. Aged 15, she was married to King Louis VII of France, uniting the two dynasties into a formidable alliance. She gave Louis two daughters, Countess Marie of Champagne and Countess Alix of Blois, but – as with King Henry VIII of England four centuries later – the absence of a son created tensions, and strains started to show in their marriage.
Often overlooked in her early years, Eleanor nevertheless had a keen sense of adventure. In 1147, aged 25, she set off to Jerusalem with Louis on the Second Crusade. The Byzantine historian Nicetas says she raised and led an army of armed and mounted women, but he was making it up. Nevertheless, it reveals something of how deeply contemporaries were struck by her decision to join the military campaign of the generation.
As it turned out, the French crusading expedition was a failure, and the journey did nothing for Eleanor’s marriage. To make matters worse, rumours began spreading that, at Antioch, she started having an affair with her uncle, Prince Raymond of Antioch. What is true is that she and he both spoke the southern French language of Occitan, which the northern French did not, and also that Raymond and Louis had very different ideas on how the crusade should be waged, which put her in between the two of them. The crusaders’ time in Antioch was highly politicised by these factors, and the rumours of her infidelity are unlikely to be anything other than the usual bitchiness of medieval chronicles. By the thirteenth century rumours were even circulating that while in the East she had bedded Saladin (who did not actually appear in the crusades for another generation, and was a 10-year-old boy in Iraq at the time of her crusade).
For a multitude of reasons, she and Louis became increasingly estranged, and once the pair were home again in France, the marriage was finally annulled for consanguinity in March 1152. She was 30.
On 18 May that same year, she married Henry Plantagenet, Count of Anjou and Duke of Normandy, and 11 years her younger. The marriage took place in Poitiers, but within two years the pair were crowned King and Queen of England at Westminster Abbey. The union of Henry’s Angevin territories in Britain and northern France with Eleanor’s dynastic lands in Aquitaine created an Anglo-French empire that stretched from Scotland to the Pyrenees.
Henry set about consolidating his domains with vigour, and so did Eleanor. She travelled inexhaustibly, shoring up loyalties and cementing the new political bloc, spending long periods on the road ensuring the monarchy was present and relevant across its many cultural divides. When Henry was away, she became intimately involved in directing the empire’s governmental and ecclesiastical administration. Famously, she also sponsored unparalleled artistic activities at her home court in Poitiers, making it a unique centre of troubadour poetry and music.
At home, Eleanor gave Henry seven children: Count William IX of Poitiers (died young); King Henry “the Young King” of England, Duchess Matilda of Saxony and Bavaria, King Richard I of England, Duke Geoffrey II of Brittany, Queen Eleanor of Castile, Queen Joanna of Sicily, and King John of England. Expense records show that she spent a lot of time with her children, whom she took travelling on royal business with her. Keenly aware of dynastic needs, she worked hard to broker their marriages and ensure they enjoyed powerful alliances and positions on the continent. Her own marital life, however, was not smooth, and aggravated by Henry’s endless and flagrant adulteries.
The crisis came in 1173, when their sons revolted against Henry. Instead of backing her husband or remaining neutral, she sided with the children. It was probably the culmination of numerous factors — Henry’s perceived controlling of their sons’ inheritances, his involvement in the way she exercised power in her dynastic lands, and probably his infidelities (although this was not given as a reason by medieval chroniclers). When the rebellion started to go wrong, Eleanor was eventually captured seeking refuge in France. Henry brought her back to England, and placed her under house arrest, perhaps at Salisbury. She remained shut away until he died in 1189, and she played no role in public life in these 15 years.
Once freed by Henry’s death, and now 67 years old, Eleanor embarked on one of the most extraordinary periods of her life — or of any woman’s life in medieval England.
She reengaged fully with the political and administrative affairs of her Anglo-French domains, becoming heavily involved in laying the groundwork for the coronation of her son, Richard the Lionheart, as King of England. She travelled the length and breadth of his future kingdom, visiting cities and castles, extracting oaths of allegiance and goodwill to the new king. After his coronation, Richard left almost immediately on the Third Crusade to fight Saladin, and she took over running the kingdom in his absence, ably fending off the politicking of her son John and King Phillip II Augustus of France. When Richard was imprisoned by the duke of Austria on his way back from the crusade, she raised the ransom and personally escorted him home.
When Richard died in 1199, John became king of England. Concerned for the future stability of the realm, Eleanor, now 77, travelled to Spain to fetch her granddaughter Blanche of Castile, whom she married to the heir to the French throne in the hope of shoring up the alliance with Capetian France. She went on to protect Aquitaine and Anjou from her grandson, Arthur of Brittany, even personally defending the fortified city of Mirebeau by refusing to surrender it to Arthur’s armies. Instead she battened down the hatches, organised its defences, and waited for John to arrive, before delivering the town safely to him.
Eleanor retired to Fontevrault in France, and died in 1204, aged 82. Her tomb still rests there, in between those of Henry II and Richard I. While their effigies show them in the royal regalia of the kingdoms she helped them run, she lies in repose reading a book.
In the centuries since her death, she has been portrayed as everything from a frivolous, vindictive, selfish, rich girl to a clever, indefatigable, accomplished, stateswoman. The historian’s task is not easy in her case. When it comes to royal politics, the medieval chronicles dealing with Eleanor’s life are shot through with partisan fake history — not to mention clerical horror at a woman operating at the highest levels of the court — making it difficult to form a sharp image of the real person. What is certain is that historians have dwelt too heavily on her court of poetry and chivalry at Poitiers, which almost certainly never existed in the courtly-love form commonly portrayed, and have neglected her extraordinary political life.
Even many of her enemies found it difficult not to acknowledge her personal contribution to European statecraft over a lifetime that lasted twice as long as that of many kings. It says something of the tireless travelling and relationship-building she undertook throughout her life that even after her death and John’s loss of England’s French possessions, her dynastic lands in Aquitaine — unlike Normandy — remained staunchly loyal to the English throne.
As the monk Richard of Devizes noted, she was “without compare”.