What do we know of Louis? His seal in 1137 shows a long-haired young man, but we know little else of his appearance.163 He had now spent six years, since the death of his elder brother, preparing for rule, yet the aura of piety never left him. Unusually, there was no contemporary gossip of Louis having a mistress. Much later, when he was married to his third wife, Adela of Champagne, it was suggested that a prostitute be sent to him, to hasten his recovery from an illness. The chronicler Gerald of Wales noted this religious man’s response: ‘If nothing else will cure me, let the Lord do his will by me, since it is better to die ill and chaste than to live as an adulterer.’164
Eleanor and Louis began their journey to Paris almost immediately after their marriage. They stopped at Poitiers on the way, where Louis was invested duke of Aquitaine. But Louis’ father, meanwhile, was on his deathbed. Louis the Fat died just days after his son’s marriage, on 1 August. Louis and Eleanor, France’s new king and queen, remained in Poitiers, where they received the news just after Louis’ ducal investiture, and were crowned on 8 August.
What did Louis, now king of France, inherit in the summer of 1137? The French kingdom had emerged out of the remnants of the mighty Carolingian Empire. In 751, Pepin the Short, the mayor of the palace in the service of the last Merovingian king Childeric III, seized the throne from his master. Pope Stephen II countenanced his appropriation of the throne in return for a donation of land in central Italy, known as ‘the Donation of Pepin’, to the papacy.§ Pepin was duly crowned king of the Franks; he was the first of the Carolingian kings.
Pepin followed the common practice of the Frankish kings, and at his death he divided his lands between his two sons, Charlemagne (the Great Charles), and Carloman. When Carloman died in 771, his famous brother become sole master of a vast Frankish Empire. Charlemagne reached the apotheosis of his empire-building when Pope Leo III crowned him emperor of the Romans on Christmas Day 800, accompanied by the words ‘Most pious Augustus, crowned by God, the great and peace-giving Emperor’.165 Charlemagne ruled, either directly or indirectly, lands that encompassed modern-day France, the Spanish March, Germany, Flanders, much of Italy and central Europe. It was the largest land mass in Europe held in a single hand since the fall of Rome in the West.
But Charlemagne’s empire did not long survive his death; his descendants did not possess his extraordinary abilities. His only surviving son, Louis the Pious, held his father’s domains, but when he died in 840, the lands were divided among his three sons – Charles the Bald, Louis the German and Lothair I – at the Treaty of Verdun of 843.166 Lothair took a conglomerate of territory (the ‘Middle Kingdom’) including the lands that would become known as ‘Lotharingia’ – Lorraine, Provence, Burgundy and Charlemagne’s territories in Italy. He kept his grandfather’s imperial capital, Aachen, and the title. This ‘Middle Kingdom’, however, would not survive, and its lands were eventually absorbed into the east and the west Frankish kingdoms.
Louis the German took the eastern part of Charlemagne’s empire, lands which would eventually form Germany. Their half-brother Charles the Bald took the west, uniting Aquitaine, Gascony, Septimania, and an area that encompassed most of the rest of modern France. It was from the remains of the western part of the Frankish Empire that Louis would, nearly 300 years later, inherit his kingdom.
The western Frankish Empire, however, began to disintegrate. By the beginning of the tenth century, Aquitaine, Brittany and Flanders, under their ever more powerful dukes and counts, acted independently of the Crown. In 911, Henry’s ancestor Rollo, a Viking raider most probably from Norway, was given all the lands from the River Epte to the sea by a weak King Charles III (the Simple), in return for his homage and conversion to Christianity. These lands would become known as Normandy (land of the Northmen).
When Hugh Capet, a count of Paris, was elected king by the Frankish magnates after the death of the last Carolingian monarch in 987, Louis VII’s house emerged. Hugh Capet gave his name to the dynasty – the Capetians – which would rule France until 1328, when the throne passed to their Valois cousins. Yet Hugh Capet’s and his descendants’ grasp on their lordships was minimal, as even such relatively small counties as Blois and Anjou paid their monarch little heed.167
Louis the Fat had done more than any of his predecessors to increase the power of the French crown, gradually extending their influence outside the region around Paris and the Île de France. But his success was limited, and the territory inherited by his son, Louis VII, was only a tiny area surrounded by over-mighty vassals – the count of Flanders, the count of Champagne, the duke of Burgundy, the duke of Brittany, the count of Blois, the count of Anjou and the duke of Normandy.
With his marriage to Eleanor, Louis immediately appropriated the enormous riches of his new wife for the French crown, and called himself duke of Aquitaine. Orderic Vitalis noted that ‘Louis obtained the kingdom of the Franks and the duchy of Aquitaine, which none of his ancestors had held.’168 In theory, through his fabulous marriage, his power was already greater than his father’s.
There was, however, a problem with the marriage; according to the church, it was incestuous, or consanguineous. Eleanor and Louis shared a common ancestor, King Robert II of France, which made them third cousins once removed. Church law would not allow couples to marry if they were related within seven degrees, or if they shared one great-great-great-great-great-grandparent.169
Mutterings about the irregularity of their marriage began almost immediately. Bernard was never an advocate, and wrote to Bishop Stephen of Palestrina to complain about it in 1143, accusing Louis of sanctimoniously haranguing other couples about problematic marriages while his also violated the law.170
But it would seem that in Bordeaux in 1137, although Eleanor may have been aware that she was marrying against church law, Louis was not. And even had Louis the Fat known of the problem as he took advantage of the death of William X of Aquitaine to marry off his son to its wealthy new duchess, Eleanor was far too rich for him to care. Aquitaine was roughly a third of the size of modern France, and its acquisition was irresistible to a king in need of a kingdom.
Louis VII adored his wife – John of Salisbury says he loved her ‘almost beyond reason’ – but Eleanor was unhappy.171 The early years of her marriage to Louis were marred with disappointment, war and heartbreak, marked by a jostling for power with Louis’ formidable mother, Adelaide of Maurienne, his mentor, Abbot Suger, and his powerful advisors.
Louis had spent his early life in the cloisters and had fully imbibed the teaching of the church fathers as to the dangers of sexual desire to the immortal soul. We may assume that their sex life was not particularly fulfilling for Eleanor, and she had limited success in influencing her husband from the privacy of their bedchamber.
Although at the very beginning, Eleanor’s new position by Louis’ side caused her jealous mother-in-law to flounce from court to retire to her estates – she accused Eleanor of spending too much money – and Abbot Suger to devote himself more and more to the rebuilding of Saint-Denis in a magnificent Gothic style, there was little room for her to exercise power; she was soon marginalised. She certainly did not wield the sort of power Adelaide had done as Louis the Fat’s consort, constantly at his side. Louis listened instead to his powerful advisors, particularly Raoul de Vermandois, his cousin and seneschal of France.
Eleanor did not enjoy an easy relationship with Louis’ other close advisors. She loathed some of her husband’s inner circle, particularly Thierry Galeran, who had been an advisor of Louis’ father. John of Salisbury wrote that he was ‘a eunuch whom the queen had always hated and mocked’.172
Louis’ military ineptitude was disappointing to Eleanor. He failed to put down a rebellion in Poitiers, and his campaign in Toulouse to conquer territories she claimed through her paternal grandmother Philippa also ended in failure.
There was another strain on the relationship, one which had unforeseen and dreadful consequences. Eleanor’s sister Petronilla appears to have fallen in love with Count Raoul de Vermandois. Although Raoul was much older than