For somebody from the 12th century, Eleanor of Aquitaine turns up in the movies a lot. Pamela Brown in Becket and Katherine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter played her on the big screen, and a number of actresses have done her on TV, usually in various versions of the Robin Hood legends.

Eleanor, due to the premature death of her father Guillaume while on pilgrimage to Compostella, became Countess of Poitou and Duchess of Aquitaine at age 15 in 1137. Women in the 12th century didn’t have much say in who they married; heiresses even less; and duchesses less still. Eleanor was quickly married off by her feudal overlord, Louis the Fat, to his own son (also Louis). The Dauphin Louis had come into his position unexpectedly too; his elder brother Philip had been riding through the fetid streets of Paris when his horse somehow became entangled with a rooting sow. Philip was pitched off, landed on his head, and Louis (who had been training for a career in the Church, like many second sons) was suddenly heir to the throne of France; when his father died, Eleanor became queen to King #1.


Louis and Eleanor seem to have been poorly matched, with Louis fond of the Church and monks and cathedrals while Eleanor enjoyed poetry and troubadours and witty conversation. They got along well enough to have two daughters, but the clergy disliked Eleanor’s behavior, which was thought to be indecorous. Matters came to a head when Louis went on the Second Crusade, accompanied by Eleanor and a number of other noble ladies. There was some sort of mixup involving Eleanor setting up camp ahead of the main body, which resulted in an ambush in the mountains of Anatolia; and there are hints of less than proper behavior with Raymond of Antioch. At any rate, Louis (or more likely his clerical advisors) suddenly discovered that his marriage with Eleanor was consanguineous. (Since relatives up to the eight degree were considered consanguineous, it was pretty difficult for European royalty to find anybody to marry that wasn’t a relative; the Church used this to control who married who, since any noble couple required some sort of dispensation to marry; similarly although divorce was prohibited it was not terribly difficult to get an annulment as long as you kept good relations with the Vatican).


That left Eleanor still the Countess and Duchess of two of the most valuable properties in Europe and thus a winning ticket in the marriage lottery. There were a couple of kidnapping attempts by miscellaneous Peers of France, but Eleanor ended up with Henry, Duke of Normandy. In what must have given contemporary historians a sense of déjà vu, a series of convenient deaths in England left the Duke of Normandy as King Henry II (and King #2 for Eleanor). The French were not pleased, since Henry now controlled more of France than Louis did. There were a number of confrontations between Henry and Louis, ranging from hostile negotiations to out-and-out warfare; Eleanor was involved to some extent in most of these. She and Henry obviously had time in between campaigns, however, as they had eight children – and this is where things began to break down between them. All of Henry and Eleanor’s male children were ambitious and wanted power on their own; their father was indulgent. Thus the second son (the first son had died in infancy) was crowned during his father’s lifetime as Henry, king of England (although he was formally king, he doesn’t get a number and thus is usually known as Henry the Young King). Third son Richard became Duke of Aquitaine; fourth son Geoffrey was Duke of Brittany, and fifth son John was Lord of Ireland (the epithet “John Lackland” indicates what contemporaries thought of the value of Ireland; Henry II apparently undertook the conquest of Ireland in 1171 just so John, who seems to have been his favorite son, would have somewhere to rule. This has had, of course, interesting historical ramifications).


Henry’s sons all turned against him – supported by their mother and by her ex-, Louis VII of France. Even the Young King wanted power and dominion now, rather than some future promise as King of England. Richard seems to have been far and away the most competent, and the most ruthless, inflicting pretty horrible damage (“getting medieval”, as it were) on towns and individuals who revolted against him (because he, in turn, had revolted against his own father). Henry and Eleanor tried to patch things up but he eventually lost patience and put her under house arrest in Sarum Castle until his death in 1189.


With Henry the Young King already dead (from a fever, and begging forgiveness from his father) Richard I was King of England (King #3). Despite the many portrayals of him as a bluff, hearty English monarch in numerous Robin Hood films, he actually hated England and couldn’t speak English (although, admittedly, I couldn’t speak what passed for English at the time either). He promptly headed off on the Third Crusade; although he had some success he eventually abandoned recapturing Jerusalem and ended up getting captured himself (by Leopold of Austria) on the way back home. This resulted in an immense ransom demand; 150000 marks of silver (about three trillion dollars in modern purchasing power, and around three times the entire revenue of England of the time). The resulting taxes, collected by Eleanor, didn’t do much to improve Richard’s popularity (and his brother John took advantage of that; again, the image of John as a unpopular king as presented by many Robin Hood stories appears to be incorrect. John was certainly hated by the nobility and clergy, who were being taxed to the limit, but seems to have been reasonably well like by the rest of the populace).


Richard eventually got out of Austria, and promptly got himself killed besieging a small castle in Limousin over the rumor that a great treasure had been found. He died in Eleanor’s arms from a gangrenous arrow wound. That left John King of England (King #4), disputed only by the claim of Arthur of Brittany, son of John’s older brother Geoffrey (who had died some time earlier). While in John’s custody, Arthur went swimming in the Seine with a large rock fastened to his neck (alternative histories report he carelessly fell off a castle battlement while walking with his guards) and John was uncontested King of England. The Plantagents were nothing if not brutally efficient.


By now, Eleanor was in her eighties and retired to the abbey at Fontevrault, where she died in 1204, having seen rather more history than she probably cared to. This is obviously more of a history of her times, rather than of her life proper; there just isn’t that much documentation and there are whole years when she isn’t mentioned at all. Author Amy Ruth Kelly is almost as interesting as Eleanor; as near as I can tell this was the only book she wrote during her long career as an English professor at Wellesley. Published in 1950, it is still cited as the definitive biography of Eleanor. Kelly’s prose is ornate and entrancing; they don’t write histories like this anymore.
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This is a competent biography of a long and important life. I'd call it a classic of the genre. She was a major pillar of the Plantagenet dynasty and empire. Endlessly mined by historical novelists, this book has charms of its own, and repays a careful reading. ( )

You hear the occasional reference to Eleanor of Aquitane in European history and historically-related writing, but who was she really? This biography by Amy Kelly attempts to answer that question.

I read somebody else’s review shortly after I started reading this that complained that it didn’t really give you much of a sense of who Eleanor was as a person, and after having read the whole thing,
I have to agree that is true. However, I am convinced that this is not the author’s fault. She has exhaustively researched her subject and seems to have included nearly every fact, poetic reference, and rumor available, with the possible exception of Eleanor’s court rulings when she was sitting in judgement in some court as a stand-in for her second husband, Henry II of England or her son, Richard I (Coeur-de-Lion), and she has even speculated a little regarding Eleanor’s possible sentiments at certain periods of her life, especially during her early years when she was first married to Louis VII of France, but the problem appears to be that there are few actual direct facts recorded about Eleanor, and much of what we know about her is recorded incidentally to the lives of her husbands and sons. In order to get very much closer to what she was really thinking or feeling a biographer would have to be making stuff up.

What we do know is that she was married to Louis VII when she was fifteen, a marriage hastily arranged after the death of her father by Louis’ father in order to secure the large and rich provinces of Aquitane and Poitou along with some other lands of which she was heiress to the French throne. They had two daughters, but no sons that lived, and desiring sons he received permission from the Pope to divorce her, citing consanguinity (which idea Eleanor herself had first brought up). Almost as soon as she was free of Louis, she married Henry, whose father was at the time Duke of Anjou (and some other places). Not long after that, Henry succeeded his father as the Duke of Anjou, and a little later still he became King of England. He took Eleanor there, and proceeded to establish new courts and generally consolidate his hold there. This is where Eleanor occasionally dispensed justice in his stead when he had to be off doing something else.

Henry and Eleanor had eight children altogether, five of whom were boys. One of the boys died young, but the others all managed to grow up. So when, a number of years later, Henry decided that he too wanted to divorce her, he did not have the excuse of not having any heirs. His idea was to install her in an abbey as abbess, but it never happened, and apparently he never succeeded in getting the pope to approve the divorce, so he kept her imprisoned in a castle in England for about sixteen years while he feuded with his sons over who would succeed him and who would get which of his properties.

After Henry’s death, Eleanor was free again and spent the rest of her life supporting the reigns of first Richard, who was the oldest of her sons still living by then, and the John, the fifth and last remaining son, although she was very old by the standards of the time by then. She died in 1204, after a long life of having been in the middle of many of the major events of her time.

The book was very dense with facts. It was not boring or hard to read, but anyone without a serious interest in history would probably not care for it. ( )

This was a very informative biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine, who ruled in France and England during the 12th Century, thanks to two marriages. She also bore two kings of England, Richard-the-Lionhearted, and King John.

I don't believe I've ever read the facts behind these two legendary kings, nor had I ever read anything of Eleanor.

I appreciated the research that so obviously went into this book, and I also appreciated the readable style.

This book has caused me to become more interested in the Middle Ages. ( )

A true classic of biography of women ( )