qqueenofhades:

OKAY BUT ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE THOUGH.

aka, I love this woman So Fucking Much and you should too.

She was born in Aquitaine (southern France) in 1122 and her grandfather was Duke William IX of Aquitaine, also known as the Troubadour, because he wrote a lot of (often highly risque) songs. Eleanor was raised in the liberal south of France, along with her younger sister Petronilla, and when her father died, she was fifteen years old and became sole heiress to Aquitaine, the largest and wealthiest province of France. So her guardian, Louis VI (aka Louis the Fat) quickly married her off to his son, Louis VII, who was two years older.

Eleanor’s time as Queen of France was… eventful to say the least. She was used to the south of France, which along with the different language (langue d’oil was northern French, langue d’oc was southern French) was far less buttoned up and starchy than the Very Proper and Boring French court. Louis adored her, but his advisors disapproved of him listening to her on things (which was a shame, because Louis usually screwed them up, bless his heart). Eleanor liked to have fun and also sex, which Louis pretty much did not (she later complained that she had married a monk, not a king – Louis was intended for a career in the church before his older brother died, making him heir, and never kicked the habit). She fought quite a bit with Bernard of Clairvaux, one of Louis’ most influential churchmen, and it took until 1145 for Louis and Eleanor to have their first child – a daughter named Marie. This was No Bueno since they obviously needed a son. The Capetian dynasty were kings, but they were generally the least powerful overlords in the country, and their power was limited outside Paris and the surrounding area. Eleanor was very much someone who was all over the scandalous tabloids and gossip mills of her day, and her behavior was generally considered too outrageous for a queen. She was known as one of the most beautiful women in Europe and did whatever tf she wanted, causing massive heart attacks among the churchmen. Her sister Petronilla also fell in love with a French nobleman, the already-married Raoul of Vermandois, and they ran off to get married, which caused a huge scandal for Louis.

Anyway, the Second Crusade was called, Louis decided to go, and Eleanor decided she was coming too. They packed up and fucked off to the Holy Land, where a lot of things went wrong, for which Eleanor was promptly blamed. She was also accused of having an affair with her uncle Raymond, prince of Antioch, who was a) handsome b) accomplished and c) a hell of a lot more interesting than milquetoast Louis. They probably didn’t actually sleep together, but they at least flirted (Eleanor had never known him as a child) and this of course was Extra Shocking because crusade and holy war and as a result, women were barred from going on the next crusade (of which Eleanor’s son would be one of the major leaders) because Eleanor was considered to be such a bad example.

 Anyway, Louis screwed the pooch, the siege of Damascus was a disaster, and the crusade broke up in general and humiliating failure, as did Louis and Eleanor’s marriage. They returned separately to France, Eleanor had a lot more adventures on the way, and the Pope tried to reconcile them, which resulted in the birth of a second child. Unfortunately, this was also a daughter, Alix. This was just about the last straw, and divorce proceedings were initiated.

Around this time (1150), the eighteen-year-old Henry, son of Empress Matilda and Geoffrey of Anjou, came to Paris with his father. Geoffrey of Anjou was legendarily good-lookin’ (his nickname was Geoffrey le Bel or the Handsome) so naturally, rumors quickly got around that Eleanor had slept with him. She also turned his son Henry’s head while she was at it, despite being 12 years older than him. Six weeks after she divorced Louis, she married Henry (1152) and two years later, at the death of King Stephen, Henry became king of England. (His mother Matilda, also a formidable woman, had been fighting her cousin Stephen for the throne for nineteen years, and the settlement dictated that Matilda’s son became king after Stephen died). Henry was also duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, count of Anjou and Maine, and would add more titles as he went.

In short, Eleanor was now the queen/duchess/countess of most of western Europe, she’d married Louis’ bitter rival who commenced one-upping him at every opportunity, and to salt the wound, she and Henry promptly had a buttload of kids, including four sons in six years – William, Henry, Richard, and Geoffrey – and three daughters. (The unlucky John wasn’t born until 1166 when they were already estranged). Only William died in infancy, and Eleanor was busy with childbearing and less involved in politics during the early years of Henry’s reign. However, her sons grew up, and she and Henry – two very stubborn, passionate, strong-willed, intelligent people – fought quite a bit, especially over the infamous Thomas Becket affair (Eleanor had been against appointing him as archbishop of Canterbury, Henry didn’t listen, and it Backfired.) Henry was a notorious philanderer who had never been faithful to her and had a lot of mistresses, tried to divorce her at a few opportunities and take her lands, and Eleanor wasn’t having that. So around 1172-1173, she encouraged her teenage sons, Henry, Richard, and Geoffrey, to go to war against their father, who they resented because he kept promising them their inheritance and never giving them anything. (The Angevins are sometimes called the “devil’s brood,” as they were supposedly descended from the Devil’s daughter Melusine – a story that Richard in particular loved – and nobody who met these red-haired, hot-tempered, ambitious, totally unstoppable people probably doubted it). There were rumors that Eleanor had poisoned Henry’s favorite mistress, Rosamund Clifford, among other things. So it was generally a clusterfuck.

Meanwhile, Eleanor had MORE adventures, disguised herself as a man at a few points, and finally caused enough of a pain that Henry captured her and shut her up in jail for sixteen years, in Salisbury and Winchester. Eleanor patiently waited this out, and then when Henry died, having fought his sons to the end, Richard became king. He and Eleanor were very close and he had always been her favorite son, so he let her out of jail at once and she became the de facto regent (and later the actual regent) of England as he prepared to go on crusade. Mind you, at this point, she was almost seventy years old.

Eleanor then went to Spain to fetch Richard’s intended wife, Berengaria of Navarre, took her to Richard in Sicily, stayed there exactly four days, then went back to England to break up domestic squabbles that had already started in the king’s absence. En route, she went to Rome and visited the Pope, got home and stayed an active player in politics while Richard was abroad (which included thwarting John and Philip II of France, both of whom hated Richard for different reasons; Philip was Louis’ son by his third marriage). Then when Richard got captured on his return from crusade, Eleanor personally oversaw the raising of his ransom – 100,000 marks of silver, a huge amount of money – and traveled with it to Germany. She was now seventy-two. Retirement is for losers.

Eleanor stayed the effective queen of England during the rest of Richard’s reign, and he died in her arms, having contracted gangrene from an infected wound, in 1199. She immediately manipulated and pulled out the stops to support her youngest son John becoming king after that, though they had always had a difficult relationship. She once more went to Spain (this case Castile) to get her granddaughter to marry Philip’s son, Louis VIII, as part of a peace agreement; this was supposed to be Urraca of Castile, but Eleanor, aged seventy-eight, decided on her sister Blanche instead. She got trapped by her grandson, Arthur of Brittany (son of her late middle son Geoffrey, who thought he should be king instead of John) at the siege of Mirabeau in 1202, and kept him distracted (aged eighty) until John got there to break the siege and free her.

Eleanor finally retired to Fontevraud Abbey and died in 1204, aged eighty-two, just a few weeks before John famously lost Normandy to Philip II. To the end, she was a badass, a patron of literature, a woman who gave No Fucks and did what she pleased, who famously enjoyed sex, who was beautiful, accomplished, independent, defied two husbands and outlived them both, had ten children, saw three of them (Young Henry was crowned co-king in 1170 and died in 1183, before his father’s death; plus Richard and John) become king of England, outwitted popes and emperors, shocked the church enough that they tried prohibiting women on future crusades, and served as one of Richard and then later John’s most effective political operators at the age of seventy-plus. She was queen of almost all of Western Europe at one point or another, and she made no secret of enjoying that fact (she foiled a bunch of Henry’s various plots to get rid of her that would have involved any demotion in rank). 

She was in short, Completely Fucking Awesome, and in this house we love and respect her always.