Hauts LieuxChapels, sanctuaries & legends

Hauts Lieux›The great stories

Eleanor and the Plantagenets: an empire from Bordeaux to Scotland (1137-1204)
Danielclauzier · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Eleanor and the Plantagenets: an empire from Bordeaux to Scotland (1137-1204)

14 min read

Marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Louis VII at Bordeaux on 25 July 1137; annulment at Beaugency on 21 March 1152 and remarriage to Henry Plantagenet at Poitiers on 18 May 1152; Henry II king of England in 1154; murder of Thomas Becket in 1170; revolt of the sons and captivity of Eleanor from 1173 to 1189; reign of Richard the Lionheart from 1189 to his death at Châlus on 6 April 1199; fall of Château-Gaillard on 6 March 1204, death of Eleanor on 1 April 1204 and loss of Normandy

In 1137, a fifteen-year-old heiress brings Aquitaine to the king of France; fifteen years later she takes it back and gives it to Henry Plantagenet, who becomes king of England and holds, from Bordeaux to the Scottish border, the largest assembly of lands in the West. The route follows Eleanor, Henry II, Richard the Lionheart and John Lackland from the cathedral of the wedding to the palace of Poitiers, the keep of Châlus, Chinon where Henry dies, Fontevraud where the effigies lie, then into Normandy as far as Château-Gaillard and Gisors, with a last stop at Pontigny, Becket's refuge. One chapter separates what historians have established from what they have dismantled: the court of love, the adulterous queen, the fairy Melusine.

The heiress of Bordeaux

On 9 April 1137, a Good Friday, Duke William X of Aquitaine died a pilgrim at Santiago de Compostela. He left a daughter of about fifteen, Eleanor, born around 1122 or 1124, at Poitiers according to Martin Aurell. She inherited the largest fief in the kingdom, from Poitou to the Pyrenees; Louis VI, to whom the duke had entrusted her, at once sent his son Louis, seventeen, there with Abbot Suger. On 25 July 1137, the feast of Saint James, Archbishop Geoffroy de Loroux married them in the cathedral of Saint-André in Bordeaux, and Louis himself crowned his wife. The couple travelled back north by way of Saintes, where, Geoffroy de Vigeois writes, “it is said that they slept together for the first time”. On 1 August, Louis VI died: the young husband was king of France.

The rest with the History & Architecture key

You have just read the opening. The whole story, its timeline, its sources and its places on the map are in the application.

Read in the application

The places of this story

Read next