Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Biography (WOMEN IN HISTORY)

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Siberry, Elizabeth (2016). The New Crusaders: Images of the Crusades in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries. Routledge. ISBN 9781351885195. An alluringly candid portrait of this most public yet elusive woman… A truly epic landscape of twelfth-century Europe in all its blood and glory." ( The Boston Globe) On 21 March, the four archbishops, with the approval of Pope Eugene, granted an annulment on grounds of consanguinity within the fourth degree; Eleanor was Louis' third cousin once removed, and shared common ancestry with Robert II of France. Their two daughters were, however, declared legitimate. Children born to a marriage that was later annulled were not at risk of being "bastardised," because "[w]here parties married in good faith, without knowledge of an impediment,... children of the marriage were legitimate." [Berman 228.] [ why?]) Custody of the daughters was awarded to King Louis. Archbishop Samson received assurances from Louis that Eleanor's lands would be restored to her. While in the eastern Mediterranean, Eleanor learned about maritime conventions developing there, which were the beginnings of what would become admiralty law. She introduced those conventions in her own lands on the island of Oléron in 1160 (with the " Rolls of Oléron") and later in England as well. She was also instrumental in developing trade agreements with Constantinople and ports of trade in the Holy Lands. The photograph above was sent to me in 1999 by a reader. These heads, from the porch of the twelfth/thirteenth century church of Candes St Martin, between Chinon and Fontevrault, are thought to represent Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and date from c.1225.

Eleanor's year of birth is not known precisely: a late 13th-century genealogy of her family listing her as 13 years old in the spring of 1137 provides the best evidence that Eleanor was perhaps born as late as 1124. [6] On the other hand, some chronicles mention a fidelity oath of some lords of Aquitaine on the occasion of Eleanor's fourteenth birthday in 1136. This, and her known age of 82 at her death make 1122 the most likely year of her birth. [7] Her parents almost certainly married in 1121. Her birthplace may have been Poitiers, Bordeaux, or Nieul-sur-l'Autise, where her mother and brother died when Eleanor was 6 or 8. [8] Civilization VI: Gathering Storm – First Look: Eleanor of Aquitaine (Trailer). Firaxis Games. 5 February 2019. Archived from the original on 11 December 2021 . Retrieved 18 February 2019. Louis became involved in a war with Count Theobald by permitting Raoul I, Count of Vermandois and seneschal of France, to repudiate his wife Eleanor of Champagne, Theobald's sister, and to marry Petronilla of Aquitaine, the Queen's sister. Eleanor urged Louis to support her sister's marriage to Count Raoul. Theobald had also offended Louis by siding with the Pope in the dispute over Bourges. The war lasted two years (1142–44) and ended with the occupation of Champagne by the royal army. Louis was personally involved in the assault and burning of the town of Vitry. More than a thousand people sought refuge in the town church, but the church caught fire and everyone inside was burned alive. Horrified, and desiring an end to the war, Louis attempted to make peace with Theobald in exchange for his support in lifting the interdict on Raoul and Petronilla. This was duly lifted for long enough to allow Theobald's lands to be restored; it was then lowered once more when Raoul refused to repudiate Petronilla, prompting Louis to return to Champagne and ravage it once more. Eleanor is said to have been named for her mother Aenor and called Aliénor from the Latin Alia Aenor, which means the other Aenor. It became Eléanor in the langues d'oïl of northern France and Eleanor in English. [4] There was, however, another prominent Eleanor before her— Eleanor of Normandy, an aunt of William the Conqueror, who lived a century earlier than Eleanor of Aquitaine. In Paris as the queen of France, she was called Helienordis, her honorific name as written in the Latin epistles. Jean Plaidy's novel The Courts of Love, fifth in the 'Queens of England' series, is a fictionalised autobiography of Eleanor of Aquitaine.An outstanding account, full of insights, some scandals, and above all a fully-realised portrait of the woman who has been called 'the grandmother of Europe'." ( The A List) Eleanor was imprisoned for the next 16 years, much of the time in various locations in England. During her imprisonment, Eleanor became more and more distant from her sons, especially from Richard, who had always been her favourite. [29] She did not have the opportunity to see her sons very often during her imprisonment, though she was released for special occasions such as Christmas. About four miles from Shrewsbury and close by Haughmond Abbey is "Queen Eleanor's Bower", the remains of a possible triangular timber castle which is believed to have been one of her prisons. Weir, Alison (1999). Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life. Ballantine Books. ISBN 9780345405401. ; Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life (2008 edition) at Google Books Martindale, Jane (2004). "Eleanor [Eleanor of Aquitaine], suo jure duchess of Aquitaine". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/ref:odnb/8618. ISBN 978-0-19-861412-8. (subscription or UK public library membership required) Jones, Dan (2013). The Plantagenets: The Kings who made England. London: William Collins. p.45. ISBN 978-0-00-721394-8.

Eleanor (or Aliénor) was the oldest of three children of William X, Duke of Aquitaine, whose glittering ducal court was renowned in early 12th-century Europe, and his wife, Aenor de Châtellerault, the daughter of Aimery I, Viscount of Châtellerault, and Dangereuse de l'Isle Bouchard, who was William IX's longtime mistress as well as Eleanor's maternal grandmother. Her parents' marriage had been arranged by Dangereuse with her paternal grandfather William IX. Of all her influence on culture, Eleanor's time in Poitiers between 1168 and 1173 was perhaps the most critical, yet very little is known about it. Henry II was elsewhere, attending to his own affairs after escorting Eleanor there. [9] Some believe that Eleanor's court in Poitiers was the "Court of Love" where Eleanor and her daughter Marie meshed and encouraged the ideas of troubadours, chivalry, and courtly love into a single court. It may have been largely to teach manners, something the French courts would be known for in later generations. Yet the existence and reasons for this court are debated. [29] Eleanor is the subject of A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver, a children's novel by E. L. Konigsburg.

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married 1) Isabella, countess of Gloucester 2) Isabella, countess of Angoulême; had issue, including Henry III, King of England, Richard, king of the Romans, Joan, queen of Scotland, Isabella, Holy Roman Empress Hodgson, Natasha (2007). Women, Crusading and the Holy Land in Historical Narrative. Boydell. ISBN 978-1-84383-332-1. Eleanor was related to Henry even more closely than she had been to Louis: they were cousins to the third degree through their common ancestor Ermengarde of Anjou, wife of Robert I, Duke of Burgundy and Geoffrey, Count of Gâtinais, and they were also descended from King Robert II of France. A marriage between Henry and Eleanor's daughter Marie had earlier been declared impossible due to their status as third cousins once removed. It was rumoured by some that Eleanor had had an affair with Henry's own father, Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou, who had advised his son to avoid any involvement with her. The king of France, known as Louis the Fat, was also gravely ill at that time, suffering from a bout of dysentery from which he appeared unlikely to recover. Yet despite his impending death, Louis's mind remained clear. His eldest surviving son, Louis, had originally been destined for monastic life, but had become the heir apparent when the firstborn, Philip, died in a riding accident in 1131. [13] Evocative…A rich tapestry of a bygone age, and a judicious assessment of her subject's place within it." ( Newsday)

Wheeler, Bonnie; Parsons, John C., eds. (2008) [2002]. Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady (reprinted.). Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-60236-6. Henry II died in July 1189 and their son Richard succeeded him; one of his first acts was to free his mother from prison and restore her to full freedom. Eleanor ruled as regent in Richard’s name while he took over for his father in leading the Third Crusade, which had barely begun when Henry II died. In 1189, when King Henry II died, his Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine was released after sixteen years of imprisonment. Her custodians, Contemporary sources praise Eleanor's beauty. [9] Even in an era when ladies of the nobility were excessively praised, their praise of her was undoubtedly sincere. When she was young, she was described as perpulchra—more than beautiful. When she was around 30, Bernard de Ventadour, a noted troubadour, called her "gracious, lovely, the embodiment of charm", extolling her "lovely eyes and noble countenance" and declaring that she was "one meet to crown the state of any king". [12] [38] William of Newburgh emphasised the charms of her person, and even in her old age Richard of Devizes described her as beautiful, while Matthew Paris, writing in the 13th century, recalled her "admirable beauty".

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Matthew Paris, a well-regarded historian writing in the 13th century, gives three reasons for the divorce: consanguinity, the queen’s alleged adultery and the astonishing charge that ‘she was of the devil’s race.’ He meant it literally: Eleanor was like the folkloric figure of Mélusine, woman above and fish or serpent from the waist down, though she normally managed to conceal that trait. None of the Mélusine romances explicitly mention Eleanor, but they make suggestive links: she was either descended from such a creature or had inherited her lands. Caesarius of Heisterbach, a monk writing around 1230, observed that the English king (at that time Henry III, Eleanor’s grandson) was ‘said to be descended from a phantom mother’. Eleanor’s magical character might explain both Louis’s initial, passionate devotion to his queen and his later repugnance. One poet makes her tell her barons that the king had called her ‘something misshapen and unworthy of his bed’. This isn’t about Eleanor, either, but the tales included here are contemporary to her and would have been familiar to both Eleanor and Henry II. The true identity of Marie de France is unknown, but one possibility is that she is actually Marie, the abbess of Shaftesbury, who was Henry II’s half-sister.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. Fiona Harris-Stoertz, "Pregnancy and Childbirth in Twelfth-and Thirteenth-Century French and English Law". Journal of the History of Sexuality 21, n°. 2 (2012), pp. 263–281. JSTOR 41475080. Sometime between the end of March and the beginning of May, Eleanor left Poitiers, but was arrested and sent to the king at Rouen. The king did not announce the arrest publicly; for the next year, the queen's whereabouts were unknown. On 8 July 1174, Henry and Eleanor took ship for England from Barfleur. As soon as they disembarked at Southampton, Eleanor was taken either to Winchester Castle or Sarum Castle and held there. Pikkemaat, Guus (2011). Eleonore van Aquitanië 1122–1204, een bijzondere vrouw in het zomertij der middeleeuwen (in Dutch). Aspekt. ISBN 978-90-5911-510-1. Louis soon came into violent conflict with Pope Innocent II. In 1141, the Archbishopric of Bourges became vacant, and the king put forward as a candidate one of his chancellors, Cadurc, while vetoing the one suitable candidate, Pierre de la Chatre, who was promptly elected by the canons of Bourges and consecrated by the Pope. Louis accordingly bolted the gates of Bourges against the new bishop. The Pope, recalling similar attempts by William X to exile supporters of Innocent from Poitou and replace them with priests loyal to himself, blamed Eleanor, saying that Louis was only a child and should be taught manners. Outraged, Louis swore upon relics that so long as he lived Pierre should never enter Bourges. An interdict was thereupon imposed upon the king's lands, and Pierre was given refuge by Theobald II, Count of Champagne.

Queen of England [ edit ] Henry II of England, drawn by Matthew Paris The marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine to Henry of Anjou and Henry's subsequent succession to the throne of England created the Angevin Empire. Seward, Desmond (1978). Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-7153-7647-8. ; Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen of the Middle Ages (2014 edition) at Google Books