Eleanor of Aquitaine

Our 24th entry in project #EuropeanBios is Eleanor of Aquitaine, a complete badass who ran rings around the sexist kings of Europe in the middle ages, successfully becoming Queen of France and England and giving birth to the rulers of much of Europe after her.

Part of the goal of this project is to connect all our subjects together through personal connections. This is very easy to do for Eleanor: her first husband, Henry 2 of England, was grandson of Henry 1 of England, who was 3rd child of William the Conqueror:

Since I am an uncultured barbarian myself, I was unaware that Aquitaine is a bit of France. France at the time was not politically united, so all the various bits had independent power, and Aquitaine, which Eleanor inherited at age 15, was one of the most powerful bits.

Being an unmarried Duchess of a very powerful chunk of France made Eleanor Europe's most eligible woman. At the time it was considered a legitimate strategy to kidnap female heiresses and force marriage to steal their kingdoms, so her dad had appointed a guardian to prevent this.

This guardian was King Louis VI of France, the most recent descendant of a chain of kings who had taken over France from the children of another of our previous subjects, Charlemagne:

Louis 6 did not really do a great job of protecting Eleanor, since he realized he could unite all of France by marrying Eleanor to his son, Louis 7, so he arranged this basically immediately. Probably not what Eleanor's dad had in mind, but she took it in stride.

Louis 7 got into an internal war within France in which he burned the town of Vitry-le-François, in the process killing 1500 women and children who were taking shelter in a church. Partly to atone for this grave sin, he decided to take part in the second crusade.

We will be talking extensively about the crusades in entry 25, so for now let's just say: crusades were happening, involving a lot of Europeans invading the middle east and colonizing it, very violently. Louis was not good at war though, so the second crusade didn't go well.

Very unusually, Eleanor decided to accompany Louis on this crusade. Her presence created a legend around her as a sort of Amazonian warrior queen, but she was not actually taking part in battles, she was just present. She *was* fighting constantly, but only with her husband.

Louis and Eleanor's marriage had never gone well and went even worse on the crusade. Eleanor was apparently having affairs right and left, potentially including her uncle Raymond, and she had also failed to produce a male child, which was a problem for Louis' succession plans.

The result was eventually an annulment of their marriage by the Pope, on the basis of "consanguinity", i.e. being cousins. This was a laughable pretext as every member of every royal family in Europe were all cousins in one way or another, but it gave Eleanor independence.

Less than eight weeks after her split from Louis, Eleanor re-married the Duke of Normandy, later Henry 2, king of England. He was 12 years younger than her, a handsome and active man and they had apparently been having an affair for a long time before the marriage.

It should be clear: all of this was extremely unusual. Eleanor was doing exactly what she wanted: coming on the crusade, divorcing her husband, marrying a younger and more powerful man. This was a wild departure from the meek childbearing expected of royal women of the time.

Fun fact: Henry was also her cousin, even more closely related to her than Louis had been, so the idea that she got an annulment for being too closely related to Louis is even more ridiculous.

Initially things went well and Henry and Eleanor had eight kids. Unfortunately Henry turned out to be kind of an asshole. He had any number of affairs himself, including a long-term mistress Rosamund Clifford. Eleanor and Henry became estranged, and lived apart for years.

Meanwhile there were a lot of dynastic goings-on. Henry got sick, handed over power to his kids, but then recovered and tried to take it back. The kids weren't having it, and Eleanor enlisted the aid of her ex-husband Louis to back them up in trying to hold on to the throne.

Henry did not take well to his wife essentially trying to overthrow him and so he had her imprisoned for 16 years, in a sort of luxurious house arrest. Eventually he died and Eleanor's kid, Richard Lionheart, became king anyway. He let her out of prison.

It was while under house arrest that Eleanor apparently popularized the idea of "courtly love", a weirdly formal concept of love and honor invented by her grandfather. This concept would become a huge deal for knights and the crusades, as we'll hear later.

We will be covering Richard, who was apparently quite entertaining, in a later thread. But he went on another crusade and died. Eleanor outlived him and nearly all of her children, living into her 70s. She was still alive for the lifetimes of our next 5 biography subjects.

Eleanor's descendants ruled Europe for centuries after her death and the courtly love she popularized influenced whole invasions of countries. She was an independent woman who did whatever the hell she wanted for decades in an incredibly sexist age, and that's pretty neat.