Eleanor of Aquitaine

Eleanor, heiress to the great duchy of Aquitaine in south-western France, was queen of France in her first marriage and queen of England in her second, and the mother of two English kings. Over a long life, from about 1124 to 1204, she went on crusade, ruled as regent and spent sixteen years in captivity. Because the chroniclers of her time said little about her, much of her popular image comes from rumour and later legend.

The earliest record of Eleanor dates from 1129, and a later family genealogy implies she was born in 1124; her birthplace is uncertain. She was the eldest child of Duke William X of Aquitaine. When he died on pilgrimage to Compostela on 9 April 1137, she inherited a duchy far richer than the lands the French king ruled directly. William had placed her under the protection of King Louis VI, who quickly married her to his heir. The wedding took place in Bordeaux on 25 July 1137; within days Louis VI was dead, and the teenage couple became king and queen of France.

Eleanor was unpopular with leading churchmen such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Abbot Suger, who thought her conduct unseemly. She took the cross alongside her husband and in 1147 set out with him on the Second Crusade. At Antioch, ruled by her uncle Raymond, she sided with his plan to campaign in Syria against Louis's wish to go on to Jerusalem. Later chroniclers hinted at an affair between uncle and niece, a charge with no firm evidence that became part of her legend.

The marriage produced two daughters but no son. On 21 March 1152 four archbishops annulled it on grounds of kinship, leaving the daughters legitimate and returning Aquitaine to Eleanor. Escaping two attempts to seize her on the road south, she married Henry, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou, at Poitiers on 18 May 1152. In 1154 he became king of England as Henry II, and the couple ruled lands reaching from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees.

Eleanor bore Henry five sons and three daughters, among them Richard and John, and often acted as regent while he was elsewhere. From 1168 she lived mainly at Poitiers, governing her own duchy. The well-known story that she presided there over "courts of love" comes from a later treatise by Andreas Capellanus and has no supporting evidence, though troubadours did attend her court.

In 1173 her sons Henry the Young King, Richard and Geoffrey rebelled against their father with French backing. Chroniclers reported that Eleanor encouraged them, adding "so it was said". She was captured on her way to join them, and after the revolt failed she was held in England, sometimes loosely, until Henry's death in 1189. Stories that she had a hand in the death of Henry's mistress Rosamund Clifford are later myths with virtually no contemporary support.

When Richard became king in 1189, Eleanor was freed and governed England in his name while he prepared for the Third Crusade. She escorted his bride, Berengaria of Navarre, to Sicily, and after Richard was captured on his way home she organised the raising of his ransom and travelled to Germany in person, securing his release in February 1194. She then retired to the abbey of Fontevraud.

On Richard's death in 1199 she backed her youngest son, John, against her grandson Arthur of Brittany, and in 1200 travelled to Castile to fetch her granddaughter Blanche of Castile as a bride for the heir to France. In 1202 Arthur besieged her at Mirebeau until John relieved the castle.

Eleanor died at Fontevraud on 31 March or 1 April 1204, as Philip II of France was overrunning Normandy, and was buried there beside Henry II and Richard. Through Blanche she was the great-grandmother of Louis IX of France.

Our 1200 map shows the Kingdom of England and the Angevin lands in western France near the end of her life, just before Philip II's conquests of 1203 and 1204.