Medieval royal marriages were about creating networks of power. This gave the female members of a family more influence than we might think, says JF Andrews, and the history of the five daughters and five daughters-in-law of Eleanor of Aquitaine show how these marriage connections worked in practice.
‘Name the sons of Eleanor of Aquitaine’ would be a relatively easy quiz question for anyone with a passing knowledge of royal history in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. After all, their lives and their actions are legendary. And royal power is all about the men, right?
Wrong.
When we read of the daughters of kings and queens, it’s all too easy to dismiss them with a casual ‘and she was married off at a young age to…’ and then forget about them, as though they had no further part to play in their family story.
But these marriages were strategic alliances for a reason: the women and girls concerned were expected to act in the interests of their birth family as well as the one they’d married into, and to spend their lives acting as a bridge between them. What would be the point of a political marriage alliance if the parties in question never communicated or worked together after it took place?
The example of the female members of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s immediate family is a particularly rich one. Eleanor had five daughters (two by Louis VII of France and three by Henry II of England) who all made important alliances, and five daughters-in-law who came into her network via marriage to her sons.
It would be a substantially more difficult quiz question to name all of them, but they played pivotal roles in the national and international politics of the 12th and 13th centuries, in western Europe and beyond.
Their lives spanned almost exactly a century, from the birth of Marie of France (Eleanor’s eldest daughter by Louis VII) in 1145 to the death of Isabella of Angoulême (Eleanor’s youngest daughter-in-law) in 1246, and their sphere of influence stretched across many realms and thousands of miles, incorporating England, France, Spain, Germany, Sicily, Hungary and the Holy Land.
Most of these women spent the majority of their time in different kingdoms, and some of them at different times; indeed, a number of them never even met, despite their close family relationships. However, they still formed an important network, because a royal family in the twelfth or thirteenth century was not necessarily a ‘family’ in the sense that we might think of it now
It was less a close-knit group of people with emotional ties who lived together, but rather a political and strategic unit in which each member was expected to act in order to bring advantage to the whole, regardless of their own personal feelings. And this is precisely what these women did, firstly by their marriages and later by their own actions.
As was the case for most royal brides in the Middle Ages, none of the ten women in Eleanor’s family network had any say in the choice of their first husband. This well-known fact led to a regrettable tendency in historians of later years to think that such women and girls were powerless, mere pawns in the hands of their fathers, husbands or brothers.
But this is to misunderstand the situation: the task facing a royal bride was to orient herself to the position in which she found herself via marriage and then to work out how to use her authority to best effect.
Some of them had to do this while still very young. Eleanor’s three daughters by Henry II – Matilda, Leonor and Joanna – were married at the ages of 11, nine and 11 respectively, having already been sent abroad to Germany, Castile and Sicily. When studying their lives from the comfort of the 21st century the cruelty of this seems almost unbelievable, and it wouldn’t really come as a surprise to find that the poor girls simply collapsed in a heap.
They didn’t, however, and all of them worked hard to form stable relationships with their husbands and the people in their new kingdoms, while representing and promoting the interests of their birth family.
Eleanor’s two other daughters remained in France, betrothed at the ages of seven and two, but grew up to rule vast estates, and her daughters-in-law experienced wildly disparate lives involving many changes of fortune.
Uncovering the details of all this was, unsurprisingly, more difficult than following the actions of the male members of the family, but the hidden participation and influence of these women can be found in many of the most famous incidents involving the Plantagenet dynasty.
When Richard the Lionheart was on crusade and wanted to make a peace agreement with the Muslim leader Saladin, he offered his sister Joanna as a marriage partner for Saladin’s brother.
When Richard was captured on his way home from the crusade and imprisoned, he wrote to his French half-sister Marie to request help. When he was ransomed, the hostages who were sent as bargaining chips to ensure his good faith included a brother of his wife, Berengaria, a son of his sister Matilda, and a niece who was the daughter of his sister-in-law Constance of Brittany.
And when King John was forced to agree to the terms of Magna Carta, one of the rebellious barons ranged against him was his ex-wife, Isabelle of Gloucester, while the French prince who invaded England shortly afterwards in an attempt to seize the English crown was married to John’s niece, the daughter of his sister Leonor.
There are a number of reasons why these women, and other female actors on the international stage, never received the same kind of attention as their male counterparts.
Chief among them is that the contemporary chroniclers (most of whom were monks, and all of whom were male) simply didn’t see women’s contributions as important enough to write about – and neither did the later historians of the 19th and early 20th centuries who began to write their histories of the Middle Ages, focusing very much on Great Men.
But the women are there, if you look hard enough: mentioned as afterthoughts in chronicle narratives, or with their names included on various charters that tell us where they were and when, and what they were doing. They have been relegated to the shadows of history, but by careful examination of the sources and the occasional reading between the lines, we can help them step further into the light.
The Families of Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Female Network of Power in the Middle Ages by JF Andrews is published on 16 February, 2023. It explores the lives of the ten women who were Eleanor’s daughters and daughters-in-law.
See more about this book.
JF Andrews is also the author of Lost Heirs of the Medieval Crown: The Kings and Queens Who Never Were.
There’s more about Eleanor of Aquitaine and her family in these Historia features:
The personal and the political in the Middle Ages by Catherine Hanley
Magna Carta’s inspirational women by Sharon Bennett Connolly
At the heart of English history: the Warenne Earls of Surrey by Sharon Bennett Connolly
England’s Forgotten King by Catherine Hanley
You might also enjoy:
To have and to hold: pawns in the medieval marriage game by Anne O’Brien
Lost and found: remembering William Marshal, the Greatest Knight by Elizabeth Chadwick
Images:
- Eleanor of Aquitaine’s effigy at Fontevraud Abbey: Adam Bishop for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
- Marie of France from an illuminated manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France: BnF Arsenal Library via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Henry the Lion and Matilda of England: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Joanna and Richard I meeting Philip Augustus II of France from Histoire d’Outremer, 1232–61: British Library Yates Thompson MS 12, fol 188v via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Eleanor of Aquitaine as a donor, detail from the Window of the Crucifixion, Poitiers Cathedral, 12th century: Danielclauzier for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
