Eleanor of Aquitaine

Duchess of Aquitaine in her own right, Eleanor was queen consort of France and then of England, and the mother of two English kings. The daughter of Duke William X, she inherited Aquitaine, one of the largest territories in France, on his death in 1137, and in the same year married Louis VII, who became king of France weeks later. She accompanied him on the Second Crusade in 1147-49, a venture whose failure strained the marriage. In 1152 the union, which had produced two daughters, Marie and Alix, was annulled on grounds of consanguinity.

Within two months Eleanor married Henry of Anjou, eleven years her junior, joining Aquitaine to his Norman and Angevin lands; when he became Henry II of England in 1154 she was crowned queen. The transfer of her duchy from the French to the English sphere shaped the rivalry of the two crowns for centuries. She bore Henry eight children, including the future kings Richard I and John, and for a period held court at Poitiers, where her son Richard was installed as heir to Aquitaine.

In 1173 Eleanor supported the rebellion of her elder sons against Henry II. After its failure she was held in confinement in England for some sixteen years, released only on her husband's death in 1189. Under Richard I she returned to the centre of affairs, helping govern England during his crusade and organising the enormous ransom that freed him from imprisonment in Germany. After Richard's death in 1199 she worked to secure the succession of John against the claim of her grandson Arthur of Brittany.

Eleanor's children extended the family's reach across Europe: Matilda married Henry the Lion of Saxony, Eleanor married Alfonso VIII of Castile, and Joan married first William II of Sicily and later Raymond VI of Toulouse. In 1200, around the age of seventy-eight, Eleanor herself crossed the Pyrenees to the Castilian court to select her granddaughter Blanche of Castile as bride for the future Louis VIII of France, the marriage from which Louis IX descended. She spent her last years at the abbey of Fontevraud, where she died in 1204 and was buried beside Henry II and Richard I.