(1122–1204). When Duke William X of Aquitaine died in 1137, he entrusted his fifteen-year-old daughter and heiress, Eleanor, to King Louis VI. The king quickly arranged to marry her to his own heir, Louis VII (r. 1137–80). Eleanor brought to the marriage the important duchy of Aquitaine, the southwest quadrant of France, which had long been fairly independent of the king.
Eleanor and Louis VII, who succeeded to the throne almost immediately after his marriage, were related within the “forbidden degrees,” and their union was thus officially consanguineous. Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux pointed out to them that they were related within “four or five degrees”: both were descended from King Robert II, as Eleanor’s great-grandmother Hildegard, wife of William VIII of Aquitaine, was the illegitimate daughter of Duke Robert of Burgundy, King Robert’s son. However, the royal couple paid little attention to this relationship until, after ten years of marriage, it became clear that Eleanor was not going to produce a son. Their only child so far had been a daughter, Marie.
By 1147, when Eleanor accompanied her husband on the Second Crusade—and was rumored to have flirted with her uncle, Raymond of Antioch—Louis began to express doubts about the legitimacy of their marriage. Although when they stopped in Rome on the way home, the pope urged them not to be concerned about the degree of their relationship (and indeed, promised them a son), Louis continued to worry. Finally, in 1152, after the birth of Alix, their second daughter, he divorced Eleanor on the grounds of consanguinity and shortly thereafter married Constance of Castile.
Louis apparently had not anticipated that Eleanor would herself remarry, but she did so at once, to Henry, the young count of Anjou and duke of Normandy, who became Henry II of England (r. 1154–89) just two years later. She took Aquitaine with her to her new husband, and the duchy remained in English hands until the Hundred Years’ War.
Eleanor and Henry had a son, William, within a year—indicating that Louis’s failure to have a male heir had not been her fault. Although this son quickly died, Eleanor and Henry had four more: Henry, Richard (king of England, 1189–99), Geoffroi, and John (king, 1199–1216). Eleanor retained her title of duchess of Aquitaine even while she was also queen of England, and when her son John succeeded to the English throne she personally did homage for Aquitaine to the French king so that John would not have to do so.
Eleanor seems to have used her position, both as queen of France and as queen of England, to act as a patron of the arts. Louis and Eleanor contributed to the rebuilding of Suger’s abbey church of Saint-Denis, often credited with being the first Gothic church, and Eleanor gave the abbey, by her husband’s hand, a crystal vase of ancient origin. In England, a whole series of manuscript illuminations, begun after Eleanor married Henry, are believed to have been influenced by artistic styles from the southwest of France. Because her grandfather Guilhem IX wrote troubadour lyrics, some scholars have also thought that Eleanor’s court may have influenced the rise of romances and courtly poetry in northern France in the mid-twelfth century.
Eleanor was a formidable woman—Henry II found it necessary to keep her imprisoned for part of their married life—who, as wife of two kings and mother of two more, strongly influenced the politics of both France and England in the 12th century. When she died in 1204, she was buried at the Poitevin foundation of Fontevrault, where Henry and Richard were already buried.
