Titans of History

“He made everything into a joke and made his listeners laugh uncontrollably,” reported the somewhat disapproving chronicler William of Malmesbury, who apparently felt that William’s crusading misadventures should not be fodder for uproarious rhyming couplets. The excommunicated duke, who had tucked away two wives in convents, took for his mistress the aptly named Dangerosa, wife of one of his barons. His shield had her image on it: William wanted to bear her into battle as often as she had borne him into bed.

Unable to have children with his beloved Dangerosa, Duke William married his son to her daughter. The child of this marriage, Eleanor of Aquitaine, grew up in a court unique in Europe for its secularity, its abandon, its sheer joie de vivre, surrounded by poets and singers who idolized women as beautiful, brilliant, and able always to bend men to their will.

Coming from this permissive, secular environment, Eleanor was an exotic figure in the stiffer northern courts of England and France.

At the age of sixteen Eleanor became the queen of Louis VII of France, who was a dour and solemn religious fanatic. But she refused to be simply a consort. Louis’s apparent transformation from a mild-mannered, pious young man into an energetic ruler coincided with his marriage, and contemporaries suspected Eleanor’s hand lay behind the king’s sudden willingness to crack down on his barons and meddle in Church appointments. When Louis went on the Second Crusade, Eleanor—always willing to endure the hardships of travel—joined him.

But Eleanor had quickly become disillusioned with her husband: “I thought I had married a king, and found I had married a monk,” she lamented. The crusade was a disaster. Louis was as inept as a warlord as he was joyless as a husband. Louis’s army was almost defeated on route through Asia Minor. In Antioch, Eleanor flirted with her worldly, debonair uncle Prince Raymond of Antioch, “the handsomest of princes,” causing one of the greatest sexual scandals of the era. It was claimed Eleanor was “unfaithful.” Louis kidnapped her and took her as a virtual prisoner to Jerusalem. But the crusader attack on Damascus failed and the unhappy couple returned to France. When their marriage finally ended in divorce, with no male heirs, Eleanor refused to retreat into a convent, as was expected. Rather, she took her future into her own hands. She knew what a prize her lands were. Having already thwarted two abduction attempts by would-be suitors, she proposed marriage to Duke Henry of Normandy by messenger. At the time of their marriage he was only nineteen, eleven years her junior. Just over a year later Henry succeeded to the English crown, as Henry II, and Eleanor became queen of England, uniting their vast territories to form the Angevin empire. It comprised Aquitaine, Anjou, Brittany, Gascony, Maine and Normandy—half of modern France—as well as England and Ireland. Later, when Henry’s bullying rule became intolerable, it was Eleanor who marshaled her sons into a rebellion against their father—a rebellion that she persuaded Louis to support. Henry II imprisoned her for a decade. On Henry’s death, he was succeeded by Richard I the Lionheart, who ultimately freed her.

Eleanor helped secure her sons’ inheritance. She had always governed well in her beloved Aquitaine, and as regent for Richard I, her favorite son, while he was on crusade, Eleanor demonstrated her capacity as a ruler. She thwarted repeated threats to his throne, including his brother John’s rebellion. When the holy Roman emperor captured Richard, Eleanor secured his freedom via complex negotiations and by raising the vast ransom demanded. She also sent several fierce letters reprimanding the pope for his failure to protect a crusader. After Richard’s death, Eleanor secured the succession of the unpopular John. Traveling long distances across the Angevin lands, Eleanor successfully campaigned for the support of the barons of England and Normandy over rival claimants to the throne. At eighty, Eleanor crossed the Pyrenees to choose a bride for Louis VIII personally from among her Castilian granddaughters to cement the Anglo-French alliance. Her judgment was unerring: Blanche of Castile, as queen of France, became a ruler as formidable as her grandmother had been.

Eleanor’s life consistently tested her powers of endurance. Her independence provoked Europe’s chroniclers to revile her as first an incestuous whore, then a shrew, censuring her “pagan” southern wildness and her hold over Louis VII. When rebellion broke out against Henry II, Eleanor was the focus of the blame. “The man is the head of the woman,” thundered the archbishop of Rouen, publicly threatening her with excommunication.