#king john

I know we're the Oscar's smile fanblog...

"The attraction of Eleanor of Aquitaine to post-medieval historians, novelists and artists is obvious. Heiress in her own right to Aquitaine, one of the wealthiest fiefs in Europe, she became in turn queen of France by marriage to Louis VII (1137–52) and of England by marriage to Henry II (1154–89). She was the mother of two of England’s most celebrated (or notorious) kings, Richard I and John, and played an important role in the politics of both their reigns. She was a powerful woman in an age assumed (not entirely correctly) to be dominated by men. She was associated with some of the great events and movements of her age: the crusades (she participated in the Second Crusade, and organized the ransom payments to free Richard I from the imprisonment that he suffered returning from the Third); the development of vernacular literature and the idea of courtly love (as granddaughter of the ‘first troubadour’ William IX of Aquitaine, she was also a patron of some of the earliest Arthurian literature in French, and featured in one of the foundational works on courtly love); and the Plantagenet–Capetian conflict that foreshadowed centuries of struggle between England and France (her divorce from Louis VII and marriage to Henry II took Aquitaine out of the Capetian orbit, and created the ‘Angevin Empire’). She enjoyed a long life (she was about eighty years old at the time of her death in 1204) and produced nine children who lived to adulthood. The marriages of her offspring linked her (and the Plantagenet and Capetian dynasties) to the royal houses of Castile, Sicily and Navarre, and to the great noble lines of Brittany and Blois-Champagne in France and the Welfs in Germany. A sense of both the geographical and temporal extent of Eleanor’s world can be appreciated when we consider an example from the crusades. Eleanor accompanied her husband Louis VII on the Second Crusade in 1147–9; when Louis IX went on crusade over a hundred years later, he left France in the care of Blanche of Castile, a Spanish princess and Eleanor’s granddaughter, whose marriage to Louis’s father had been arranged by Eleanor. Just this single example shows her direct influence spanning a century, two crusades and three kingdoms."