Eleanor’s family was colourful. We assume that she would have been brought up with the tales of her strong ancestresses, wielding power in their own right – Agnes of Burgundy, her grandmother Philippa of Toulouse – or as regents or wives, and sharing in inheritance, unlike their sisters to the north, where primogeniture was slowly but inexorably becoming commonplace
She would also likely have known of her grandfather William IX, ‘the troubadour duke’, who had died soon after Eleanor’s birth, in 1126. This lotus-eating duke was famous for his poetry, his affairs, his defiance of the church, his crusading expeditions, his success as a warrior, and even of occasional friendship with Muslims allied to Christians. If Eleanor was born in 1122, and not 1124 as some historians contend, she may even have had memories of him. It was about his love life, however, that the most scurrilous stories of the troubadour duke were told. In 1094 he married Philippa, daughter of the count of Toulouse. This was Philippa’s second marriage; she was the widow of the king of Aragon. Philippa’s decision to marry William was political – she wanted him to pursue her claim to rule in Toulouse. And he did, fighting on her behalf, for over thirty years.152 William IX ultimately lost, although Eleanor would later take up her grandmother’s claim.
Philippa silently tolerated William’s numerous affairs. The most notorious was with the married viscountess of Châtellerault, called ‘Dangereuse’. She and Eleanor’s grandfather lived openly together at his palace at Poitiers, Dangereuse residing in the Maubergeon Tower there. We do not know what became of Philippa. She either retired to Fontevraud, that extraordinary foundation on the borders of Poitou and Anjou where the community of men and women lived under the direction of the abbess, or she outlived William quietly and anonymously, away from him and his mistress.153
Dangereuse was Eleanor’s maternal grandmother. Before she began her affair with the duke, she had a daughter, Aénor, with her husband the viscount of Châtellerault. The duke arranged for the marriage of his son, also William, to Aénor, probably at the instigation of his mistress while she still resided with her husband. Philippa’s feelings on the choice of bride for her son are unrecorded.
William was damned by churchmen for this affair; to live with a married woman, particularly while still married, was an affront to God. The bishop of Poitiers excommunicated him, and a monk from the Limousin explained away the duke’s disastrous expedition on crusade, suffering the death of most of his army at the hands of the Turks in Anatolia, as punishment for his adultery: ‘In truth he bore nothing of the name Christian; he was, as everyone knows, an ardent lover of women, and therefore unstable in all his actions.’154
Contemporaries were ambivalent in their attitudes towards him. Although to many churchmen he was damned, to some, this duke, the first of the troubadours, was worthy of praise for his wit and his wondrous (albeit often obscene) poetry. A thirteenth-century source described him as ‘one of the greatest courtiers of the world and one of the greatest deceivers of women … And he knew well how to compose and sing.’155
He died in 1126, although his influence was still felt in the reign of his son Duke William X. This duke was educated at the cathedral school in Poitiers. Yet although he encouraged the troubadours to frequent his court, he was not a poet like his father. He seems to have been rather in his father’s shadow, as the children of able and famous parents often are. His greatest military success was capturing the area around the seaport of La Rochelle. He fell victim to Bernard of Clairvaux’s wrath when he supported the contentious antipope, Anacletus II, in 1130. Anacletus’ ancestry was too much for Bernard to bear, for he had a Jewish great-grandfather, who had converted to Christianity in the middle of the eleventh century, and changed his name from Baruch to Benedict. Voltaire would call him ‘the Jewish Pope’. For this travesty, Duke William X’s lands were placed under papal interdict, and the sainted Bernard denounced him with his typical incandescent rancour.
Nevertheless, William X capitulated to Bernard’s demands that he give up support for Anacletus. In 1135, he agreed to go on pilgrimage to the shrine of St James at Compostela. He left Eleanor and her younger sister Petronilla in Bordeaux, at the castle of l’Ombrière.
We know nothing of Eleanor’s family life, or her early education. Her father had one brother, Raymond, who would seek his fortune as prince of Antioch. She also had five paternal aunts, but frustratingly we know practically nothing about them, or the extent of any interaction with, or influence over, Eleanor. One became abbess of the convent of Notre-Dame at Saintes, and another, Agnes, was married in 1134 to King Ramiro II of Aragon.
Eleanor’s mother, Aénor, for whom she was named (Eleanor means ‘another Aénor’ in Latin) died in 1130, when Eleanor was about eight years old. Her elder brother, Aigret, died in the same year.
Eleanor was close to Petronilla, who would stay with her, and to her mother’s family, particularly her uncle, Raoul de Faye. He would be extremely important to her later in her life.
The men in her family were well educated, with a good knowledge of Latin, but we know little about how the women were educated. We do know, however, that it was commonplace for tutors to be attached to courts, and there is no reason to suppose that Eleanor was not educated. She probably learned to read and she knew Latin. She was not born to rule and did not even appear in a document until July 1129.156 What is much better known is the fame of the cathedral schools of Poitiers and Saint-Hilaire, and the cultural sophistication of the court, with its songs of courtly love written and performed by both the nobility and poor poets.
Eleanor, on her brother’s death, became her father’s heir. William X was still young and intended to marry again in the hope of having more sons. Even in the more liberal south, female rule was problematic, and it was in his interests to shore up the succession with a male heir. In 1136, he had attempted to marry the widow of the lord of Cognac, but she was forced instead to marry the count of Angoulême. For this was a period where it was not uncommon for heiresses to be kidnapped and coerced into marriage for their inheritances.
Eleanor’s father would never return from his pilgrimage to Compostela. He died suddenly on Good Friday 1137, a scant two days away from his destination. He was thirty-eight years old. His death catapulted the fifteen-year-old Eleanor to the position of duchess of Aquitaine in her own right.
Before he left, although he had made no plans for her marriage, Duke William had entrusted his daughter, the richest heiress in Christendom, to the guardianship of his nominal overlord, Louis the Fat. On William’s death, Louis promptly denied any claim that could have been made by Eleanor’s paternal uncle, Raymond, far away in Antioch, and instead betrothed Eleanor to his son, also named Louis. Eleanor’s sister Petronilla had no share of their father’s inheritance. All was subsumed by the French crown; a Capetian king had never been so closely involved in the affairs of Aquitaine.157
Louis VI, although his size had earned him the soubriquet ‘the Fat’, was an impressive and able king. He was, according to a contemporary source, ‘huge in body, but no smaller in act and thought’.158 For such a wily ruler, the marriage of his son and heir to the heiress to the greatest duchy in France was an obvious and necessary step.
Louis was seventeen. He was his father’s second son, and like Eleanor it had not been intended that he rule. But in October 1131 his older brother Philip died when his horse fell over a ‘devilish’ pig in the rutted and unpaved streets of a Parisian suburb. A source describing the prince’s demise paints an uglier picture, of the young man chasing a squire for fun through Paris’s streets, when he fell and died.159 Young Louis reluctantly left the peace of the cloister, where he had been preparing for a career in the church, to learn statecraft. In October 1131, he was anointed king at Reims Cathedral in his father’s lifetime, a not uncommon practice of the Frankish kings.
Young Louis, his marriage arranged, promptly left Paris in the summer of 1137 and travelled south to Bordeaux with his mentor Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, where he and Eleanor were married on 25 July at Saint-André Cathedral. Eleanor was crowned alongside Louis, ‘with the diadem of the kingdom’.160 Eleanor gave Louis a wedding gift – a beautiful pear-shaped vase of rock crystal. At least one historian believes it may have been a christening gift to Eleanor