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Eleanor of Aquitaine

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Eleanor of Aquitaine (about 1122 - 1204) was one of the most powerful women of the Middle Ages. She was married to the French King Louis VII and later to the English King Henry II, a marriage which produced the two English kings Richard I and John.

Heiress to the province of Aquitaine, largest and richest of French possessions, she became the target of marriage proposals from all parts of Europe. At the age of fifteen, Eleanor married King Louis VII of France, bringing to the marriage her vast possessions from the river Loire to the Pyrenees, most of what is now the west of France. She also gave him a wedding present that is still in existence, a rock crystal vase. She took part in the Crusades with some female contemporaries but as the feudal leader of the soldiers from her duchy. The story that she and those other ladies dressed as Amazons is no longer credited by serious historians, but her conduct was repeatedly criticized by Church elders as indecorous.

Even before the Crusade, Eleanor and Louis were becoming estranged. She sided with her flamboyant, handsome Uncle, Raymond of Toulouse, in his desire to capture Edessa. Louis preferred an assault on Jerusalem. When Eleanor declared her desire to go with Raymond to Edessa, Louis had her brought with him by force. When they passed through Rome on the way home, the Pope himself tried to reconcile them, and Eleanor did conceive their second daughter (Alix, the first being Marie), but there was no saving their marriage. In 1152 the marriage to Louis was annulled, on the grounds of consanguinity. Her vast estates reverted to her, and were considered no longer a portion of the French royal properties.

A year later Eleanor married Henry Plantagenet, Duke of Anjou who was subsequently to become King of England. She was ten years older than he and related in the same degree as she had been to Louis. She bore Henry five sons and three daughters (William, Henry the Young King, Richard I "the Lionheart", Geoffrey, John "Lackland", Matilda, Eleanor, and Joan) over the next thirteen years.

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In 1173, Eleanor led a rebellion against Henry, followed by their three surviving sons, although his bastard sons stood by him. She may have grown weary of Henry's numerous sexual dalliances, and she was certainlly fed up with his attempts to control her patrimony of Aquitaine and Poitiers. The rebellion was put down, and Eleanor was imprisoned for the next fifteen years.

Upon Henry's death in 1189, her son Richard inherited the throne and released his mother from prison. She ruled England while Richard went off to Crusade. She survived him and lived long enough to see her youngest son John on the throne.

Eleanor died in 1204 and is entombed (see Cadaver tomb photo) in Fontevraud Abbey next to her husband Henry and her son Richard.

Eleanor and Henry are the main characters in the play, The Lion in Winter, by James Goldman, which was made into a film starring Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn. The depiction of her in the film Becket is totally inaccurate.