When the occasional lists of the all-time rich and powerful are compiled by the media the name of Eleanor of Aquitaine is almost always present. The London Sunday Times in its list of the ‘50 Richest Ever’ labelled her the richest woman of all time. In its survey of the 100 most important people of the second millennium Time magazine dubbed her ‘the most powerful woman’ and ‘the insider’ of her century.
Charismatic, beautiful, highly intelligent and literate, but also impulsive and proud, Eleanor inherited just after her fifteenth birthday the immense wealth and power that went with the titles of countess of Poitou and duchess of Aquitaine. From that moment she played for the highest stakes, often with the dice stacked against her, until her spirit was finally broken by the death at the siege of Châlus of her favourite son, Richard the Lionheart. Neither before nor since has one woman’s lifetime been more crowded with excess of wealth and poverty, power and humiliation.
Although she was born in 1122 and died in 1204, this mysterious figure who was uniquely both queen of France and of England did not conform to preconceptions of medieval European womanhood. Raised in the Mediterranean troubadour society that esteemed amorous adventures, verse and music on a par with prowess at arms, she scandalised the tonsured schoolmen who wielded much political power in the north of France by her liberated behaviour and thinking. Even after two of her great-grandsons were canonised as St Louis of France and St Ferdinand of Spain, nothing could persuade the Church to reappraise its first judgement of her as a young whore who became an old witch. Borrowing plot and characters from the chronicles, four centuries after her death Shakespeare unkindly labelled her in his play King John a ‘cankered grandame’.
The first European poet since the fall of the Roman Empire was her crusading troubadour grandfather, Duke William IX, whose verse was philosophical but also amorous and full of humour – as befitted a man whose mistress was called La Dangerosa! The troubadours, male and female, depicted women as sensual, empowered beings and not sinful chattels whose only proper function was childbearing, and the ideal of courtly love associated with Eleanor and her daughters was in that tradition.
At a time when even monarchs rarely set foot outside their own kingdoms in peace and few women except noble and royal brides ever left the country of their birth, she travelled extensively on both sides of the English Channel and much farther afield, seeing for herself the squalor of medieval Rome whose citizens had recently killed a pope, the decadent glory of Constantinople and the ugly truth behind the romance of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Returning from the Second Crusade after a year as prisoner of her estranged husband Louis VII of France, she was hijacked by Byzantine pirates and forced by Pope Eugenius III to share Louis’ bed against her will.
Like materials, people reveal their qualities when tested nearly to destruction; the courage of this extraordinary woman is best exemplified at the time her fortunes hit an all-time low. In 1173 the armed rebellion of her three adult sons by the marriage to Henry of Anjou was defeated by his swift and ruthless counter-offensive. Her one chance of escape lay in throwing herself on the mercy of his greatest enemy – Louis, the first husband whom she had tormented and divorced.
Betrayed to Henry by men she trusted in her own household when within a few leagues of safety on Frankish territory, she knew that he would pardon his sons but deal with her more harshly. Her death would permit him to remarry and sire more legitimate sons, playing them off against the first brood in his usual fashion with the threat of a punishment or the promise of a bribe that was never honoured. Yet, unless in one of the berserker rages that betrayed his part-Viking ancestry, he would not kill her for fear of losing her dowry of Poitou and Aquitaine. In addition, another murder would not go down too well in Rome so soon after being flogged in his underwear by monks at Canterbury Cathedral and Avranches as penance for his part in Becket’s death.
On the other hand, the pope would grant him an annulment if asked, for the degree of consanguinity was even closer than that which provided the spurious grounds for her divorce from Louis. However, that solution would also involve handing back her dowry of Poitou and Aquitaine – and Henry never gave anything back, not even a son’s rejected fiancée whom he kept as his own mistress.
Eleanor knew exactly what lay ahead. Henry was eleven years her junior, a man in his prime who would never forgive her. He would allow her the illusion of freedom from time to time – an appearance at an Easter or a Christmas court, some cloth for a new dress or the privilege to go riding each morning, or to have books. But each carrot would be withdrawn when she refused to bite, and the stick would be used again harder than before.
Accustomed as she had been from birth to the luxury of good food and fine wine, fashionable clothes, amusing company, literature, poetry, music and dancing, how long could a queen live, deprived of all this and her liberty and dignity too? She was already fifty-two, in a time when most women died young in childbirth or from overwork or disease. To Louis of France she had borne two daughters. To Henry she had given five sons and three daughters to use as pawns in marriages arranged to seal the knots of alliances.
Judged by any standards, Eleanor had already lived a remarkable life. Born under the Roman laws of Aquitaine, which did not disqualify the female line from succession, she was raised to inherit the duchy after her only legitimate brother’s early death. This made her a teenage multi-millionairess, who married a crown prince and became queen of France two weeks later. Was that not enough glamour for one lifetime?
Not for Eleanor. Her years with Louis included rumours of scandalous love affairs in Paris and in the Holy Land on the Second Crusade. Divorcing him, she twice escaped kidnap and rape on the flight to safety in her own domains. There followed her years as duchess–queen of the Angevin Empire, on the move with Henry’s court as he crossed and recrossed the Channel to bring his restless magnates to heel as only William the Bastard had done before. How many women, or men for that matter, have lived such adventures and come home to tell the tale?
When Henry discarded her at the menopause, she revived the civilised lifestyle of her own court at Poitiers, where art glorified love and praised womanhood – and where she was effectively queen in her own right, not a mere consort. Yet she risked everything in an intrigue worthy of the Roman Empress Julia to unite in rebellion three sons who detested each other as much as they hated their manipulative and brutal father. Why? And why, on being taken prisoner by him, did she not accept the honourable alternative he offered, and which most women of her class and age would have preferred: to renounce her titles and retire to a convent? Frustratingly for the historian, during her fifteen years as Henry’s captive she had all the time in the world to dictate her memoirs but was deprived of secretary, quill, parchment – and at times of everything else except food.
On Henry’s death, she returned to the world stage aged sixty-seven as vigorous physically and mentally as any man or woman of half her age, demanding her jailer’s obedience by declaring herself still the crowned queen of England and thereby regent for her son Richard the Lionheart. Armed initially only with her own willpower, she governed England until he arrived and for much of his reign.
Her great moment of glory came at his coronation in Westminster Abbey, where the new monarch, who had no place in his life for women and certainly not for a wife, installed her as his dowager queen. This adored son of hers was among the worst rulers the realm would know, twice milking it dry of taxes in a ten-year reign, of which only a few months were spent in England – a country he despised, and whose language he never learned. Yet of all its kings, he alone has his statue in Westminster Square at the seat of government.
The crusades are no longer seen as a glorious episode in European history, yet for cinema and television audiences he remains King Richard of the Last Reel, heroically returning in the last minutes of the film from a mysterious Outremer to vindicate loyal Robin and his merry men and put the villainous supporters of his usurping brother John in their proper place. That web of myth, obscuring the terrible reality of what was called ‘knightly warfare’, has stood the test of eight centuries because it was spun by his mother as PR to drag out of an exhausted and over-taxed empire the enormous ransom demanded for his return from captivity, against the opposition of Prince John in league with King Philip of France, and the many Anglo-Norman barons who preferred to keep Richard locked up in Germany.
Rightly trusting no one else to conclude the deal, Eleanor then risked piracy on the high seas to convoy in person the thirty tons of ransom silver to Germany, bringing her son home after out-bluffing the Emperor, who had been offered bribes to renege on the bargain. To do all this in her mid-seventies tells us what strength of purpose she had, even then.
Why then have historians treated her so meanly?
The misogynistic Pauline clerks who penned the chronicles that are our primary sources polarised women as Eve or the Virgin Mary. For them, a woman as powerful and impious as Eleanor was Eve incarnate, and thus the cause of all man’s sin and suffering. The influential clerics with whom she fearlessly crossed swords while queen of France – from the ascetic St Bernard of Clairvaux and the great statesman Abbé Suger to the Templar eunuch Thierry Galeran – did their best to thwart her in life; the chroniclers merely continued the character assassination after her death.
But surely historians take such bias of primary sources into account?
Friedrich Heer, Professor of the History of Ideas at the University of Vienna, was trained as a historian in the Swiss tradition of Burkhardt. He observed that his colleagues educated in the Rankean nineteenth-century German system of cause-and-effect, were so intent on fitting events into ‘logical’ sequences and making each one appear to have been inevitable that they snipped the pieces of the jigsaw to make them fit into what seemed evidence of a Divine Plan, with the steady hand of God ultimately in control of man’s actions.
So it was for Ranke’s British followers, including Bishop William Stubbs (1825–1901), whose influence on the teaching of medieval history at British universities lasted into the second half of the twentieth century. If history were made logically, then every human event would be predictable. But it isn’t. Making it appear so requires distortion of inconvenient happenings and sidelining history’s losers, of whom Eleanor was one of the most magnificent. It is significant that the first modern biography of her – Amy Kelly’s Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings (Harvard, 1950) – appeared as Stubbs’ influence was at last waning.
Heer offered a second reason why his academic colleagues had devoted scant space to this queen of France and England in their writings. Although her lifetime, spanning four-fifths of the twelfth century, fell within the academic province of European medievalists, he considered them ill equipped by their training to understand this transitional period when feudalism had many forms, monarchy was experimental, the concept of nations had not crystallised and frontiers were permeable by pilgrimage and trade, even between Christian and Moor. In the throes of an economic and cultural transition, Europe was then awash with revolutionary ideas and the new music, poetry and technology brought back by pilgrims, merchants and crusaders who had travelled to the East. Nowhere was this truer than in Aquitaine, so near in spirit and geographically to the light of Moorish Spain and so far from the gloom of Capetian Paris.
Herodotus’ original concept of historia was not the recital of dates and battles, but the gaining of knowledge by enquiry. Happily, in recent years medieval history has evolved, thanks to cross-fertilisation with other academic disciplines and the expansion of women’s studies, which throw a different light on Eleanor’s lifetime. Yet her biographers since Amy Kelly have produced little new information about Eleanor, her husbands and children – and failed to explain why she chose repeatedly to pursue her own path at such great cost to herself.
In part, this is because documentation of the early twelfth century is sparse, compared with the later Middle Ages, so that the chronicles touch on Eleanor largely through hearsay tainted by scandal. In part, it is because women’s lives – even queens’ lives – were ill documented, compared with those of male contemporaries. In addition, there has been a tendency by Anglo-Saxon writers to treat her as a ‘French’ duchess, when she was effectively the queen by birth of a people who differed from the Germanic Franks in the north of what is now France by racial origin, language, culture, lifestyle and a whole system of values. Some English-speaking biographers have also betrayed an ignorance of even modern French, let alone Old French, Latin and Eleanor’s first language, Occitan – all of which are necessary to demystify this important historical figure.
Work on this biography began a quarter-century ago when I bought a partly medieval stone farmhouse in south-west France, where the local post office is in a castle built by Eleanor’s son John, of Magna Carta fame. Being bilingual in English and French, my ear was caught by the different usage and accent chantant of the locals, so different from the northern accent pointu which I and most foreigners learned in school. It was like being in the Highlands or Wales or Ireland, where Celtic people speak English with the cadence of their own language and using figures of speech that sound merely picturesque to outsiders but are the echo of its emotionally richer and more expressive idiom.
At that time the grandparental generation in the villages here still spoke what northerners despise as patois, meaning ‘the speech of those little better than animals’. Properly called Occitan or la lenga d’oc by those who speak it, it had been stubbornly giving ground during a century of prohibition in schools, where children were beaten for using the tongue they spoke at home. Since then, the media have achieved what the whip and the rod could not, killing a living language in less than two generations.
As a Scot, I sympathised with a people whose culture was being strangled by a more powerful neighbour. As a linguist I became fascinated by the language of the troubadours, which evolved from Latin so rich in shades of emotion and rhyming possibilities as to be the ideal tool of a civilisation to which the whole of Europe owes an inestimable debt for producing the first flowering of the Renaissance and influencing all European lyric poetry since.
Banned from public use in France by François I early in the sixteenth century, Occitan changed so little that studying the everyday speech of my elderly neighbours was the vital first step to understanding Eleanor’s own language as she knew it and reading first hand the thoughts and feelings of her contemporaries and intimates. This in turn has opened windows into her values and her world that were closed to previous biographers.
Douglas Boyd
Gironde, south-west France, 2004