The Richest Heiress in Europe
Eleanor was born about 1122, daughter of William X of Aquitaine, and inherited at fifteen a duchy larger and wealthier than the royal domain of France itself. Within months she was married to the heir to the French throne, who became Louis VII almost immediately. The marriage was a territorial coup for the Capetians and a poor personal match. Louis was pious and hesitant; Eleanor came from a southern court with a tradition of vernacular poetry and a very different sense of what a ruling family was for.
She went with him on the Second Crusade in 1147, one of the few women to travel with such an army, and the expedition was a disaster. At Antioch, where her uncle Raymond ruled, she supported his strategy against her husband's and the two quarrelled bitterly. Chroniclers hostile to her spread rumours about that relationship, and no evidence supports them. After fifteen years and two daughters but no son, the marriage was annulled in 1152 on grounds of consanguinity, and Eleanor recovered her lands intact.
The Angevin Empire and Its Family War
Eight weeks later she married Henry Plantagenet, count of Anjou and duke of Normandy, eleven years her junior, and two years after that he became Henry II of England. Their combined holdings stretched from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees. She bore eight children who survived infancy, including the future Richard I and John, and acted as regent in England during Henry's absences, issuing writs and hearing petitions. From about 1168 she governed Poitou and Aquitaine largely in her own right, with her son Richard installed as duke beside her.
In 1173 her three eldest surviving sons rebelled against their father, and Eleanor backed them. Their motives were concrete: Henry had given them titles without revenue or authority. The revolt failed. Eleanor was captured attempting to reach France, reportedly dressed as a man, and Henry kept her in custody in England for the next sixteen years, released only for ceremonial occasions. She was in her fifties when it began and nearly seventy when Henry died in 1189 and Richard, on taking the throne, ordered her freed.
Regent at Seventy
What followed was her most effective period. She governed England while Richard crusaded, held the kingdom together against John's manoeuvring, and when Richard was captured returning through Austria she organised the collection of an enormous ransom, taxing every rank and stripping church plate, then travelled to Germany herself to escort him home. She crossed the Pyrenees in her late seventies to fetch her granddaughter Blanche of Castile for a French marriage that would eventually make her ancestor to the kings of both realms.
After Richard's death in 1199 she worked to secure John's succession against her grandson Arthur, and in 1202 withstood a siege at Mirebeau until John relieved it. She retired to the abbey of Fontevraud and died in 1204, outliving all but two of her children. The image of her presiding over courts of love, judging cases of romance according to codified rules, comes from a literary treatise by Andreas Capellanus and is not a record of anything that happened. Her effigy at Fontevraud shows her holding an open book.
