Eleanor of Aquitaine wore two crowns, yet almost nothing she wrote survives
Eleanor of Aquitaine was queen of France, then queen of England, and mother of two English kings. She ranked among the richest people in 12th-century Europe. Yet no one wrote her biography in her lifetime, the French court barely mentions her, and even her birth year rests on a later family genealogy.
Her family had ruled Aquitaine since the 10th century, successors to Carolingian kings, and in the 1100s the duchy outshone the French crown itself, whose direct control covered little beyond the area around Paris. She was probably born in 1124; the first document naming her dates from July 1129, and a late 13th-century genealogy says she was 13 when her father, Duke William X, died in spring 1137. That made her duchess, and within months she married the heir to France, who soon became Louis VII.
The marriage produced two daughters, Marie and Alix, and a journey together on the Second Crusade, but no son. Pope Eugene III turned down a first request to annul it in 1149, citing close kinship as the grounds, before an annulment came through in 1152 after fifteen years. Louis kept the girls and Eleanor got her lands back. That same year she married Henry, Duke of Normandy, and in 1154 they became king and queen of England.
They had eight children but drifted apart. When their sons Young Henry, Richard and Geoffrey rebelled in 1173 with her support, Henry locked her up, and she stayed confined until his death in 1189 brought Richard to the throne. She then governed as regent during Richard's long absences and, when he died in 1199, pushed through the succession of his brother John. She died in 1204, with much of the old Angevin territory lost, and was buried at Fontevraud Abbey.
Most of what we know comes from clerics at royal courts, often hostile. Walter Map and Gerald of Wales wrote satirical attacks, and several churchmen were colouring their views with revulsion at Thomas Becket's murder in 1170. She appears chiefly at the edges of stories about the men around her, and legend has filled the gaps; one historian remarked that rarely has so much been written about a woman so little known.
Source: Eleanor of Aquitaine
