Margaret of Provence

Margaret of Provence belonged to a remarkable quartet of sisters who all became queens. The eldest daughter of Ramon Berenguer V, Count of Provence, and Beatrice of Savoy, she married King Louis IX of France at Sens in 1234, at about the age of thirteen. Her sister Eleanor wed Henry III of England of the house of Plantagenet, Sanchia married Henry's brother Richard of Cornwall, later King of the Romans, and the youngest, Beatrice, heiress of Provence, married Louis's brother Charles of Anjou. The four marriages wove Provence, Savoy, the Capetians, and the Plantagenets into a single web of kinship that shaped western European diplomacy for decades.

At the French court Margaret's early position was constrained by her formidable mother-in-law, Blanche of Castile, who dominated both the government and the royal household. The queen nevertheless bore Louis eleven children, among them the future Philip III, and accompanied her husband on the Seventh Crusade to Egypt. There she displayed conspicuous resolve: at Damietta in 1250, days after giving birth to her son Jean Tristan and with the king a prisoner of the Egyptians, she held the city's defenders together and helped secure the resources needed for Louis's ransom.

Her kinship with the English queen made Margaret a natural channel between the courts of Paris and Westminster, and she favored the reconciliation embodied in the Treaty of Paris of 1259 between Louis IX and Henry III. After Louis's death on crusade in 1270 she remained an active dowager for a quarter century. Much of her later energy went into pressing her claims to a share of Provence against her brother-in-law Charles of Anjou, who had acquired the county through her sister Beatrice; the dispute was pursued through negotiation and alliance but never yielded her the inheritance she sought.

Margaret supported religious foundations in and around Paris, including a house of Franciscan nuns, and lived to see her grandson Philip IV on the throne. She died in Paris in 1295, the last survivor of her sisters, and was buried at Saint-Denis.