Eleanor of Aquitaine

If you know anything about medieval history you have sort of heard of Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204).  She used to be treated as a "fabulous female," supposedly one of the very few women who actually had power then.  As I discussed in an earlier post, however, medieval women actually had far more power and agency than women did either in antiquity or in the modern period, before the twentieth century.  They did not have what we would call "equal rights," but then neither did most men.

(My theory is that modern historians looked back on the nineteenth century, when married women lost rights to their property to their husbands, and figured, "Gee, they must have been even worse off even earlier."  But history does not proceed in a straight line.)

Eleanor is and was a striking figure, with a much larger space to work on than most women, but her ability to exercise power was not unique.  She first appears as heiress to the duchy of Aquitaine, essentially the southwest quarter of France.  When her father, the duke, was dying without sons in 1137, he designated her as his heir and asked the French king, the Capetian Louis VI, to arrange a suitable match for his little girl (she was about fifteen at the time).  The French king found a suitable match all right, his own son, who shortly became Louis VII.

Louis had not originally been intended to be king.  His older brother Philip was the official crown prince, but Philip had been killed while horseback riding through the streets of Paris with his friends (racing, probably DUI), when a porcus diabolicus ran out, got tangled in the horse's legs, and threw him.  Young Louis was also about fifteen, like Eleanor, when they got married, and since he immediately became king, he had a lot on his plate for a teenager.

Then he and Eleanor had daughters but not sons, and they went on the Second Crusade which turned into a disaster, and he figured out that they were actually cousins, so he managed to get a divorce (on which see more here).  She promptly married King Henry II of England and bore him five sons, including Kings Richard the Lionheart and John. This attached Aquitaine to the English crown, which understandably caused all sorts of issues for the French, leading eventually to the Hundred Years War.

You can see why she is considered so unusual.  Very few women get to be married to two different kings (though neither was what we would call a happy marriage) and be the mother of two others.  Two of her daughters also became queens.  She was vilified during her lifetime, and stories were made up about her, such as that she flirted shamelessly with her uncle in the Holy Land while on Crusade.  She has also more recently been credited with "introducing courtly love" to northern France, which is quite unlikely.

She remained active throughout her life, helping her sons rebel against Henry II, even though at one point he had her under house arrest.  She eventually did become a nun, but she popped out to offer homage to the French king for Aquitaine, so that her son Richard would not have to go down on his knees before another king.  When she finally died, she was buried next to Henry and Richard at the monastery of Fontevraud (that's her effigy, above).

Fun fact:  She was the first person named Eleanor.  Her mother was named Aanor, a common name at the time, and she was named for her.  But she was the "other" Aanor (Aanor junior we'd say), Alia Aanor in Latin, which became Alianor, or Eleanor.

© C. Dale Brittain 2016

Royal Divorce in the Middle Ages - part two

If you're the king, your private life becomes public knowledge.  In an earlier post I discussed some well-known royal divorce cases from medieval Europe.  Here I discuss two more.

One of the most significant for political history was the divorce of Louis VII of France and Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 1150s.  He was the heir to the French throne and she the heiress to the duchy of Aquitaine, essentially the southwest quarter of France, a very wealthy territory, so it seemed like an excellent match when they married back in 1137.  But they were related within the "forbidden degrees," being third cousins.  When after years of marriage they had only had a couple of daughters, Louis became convinced they were being punished by God for the sin of incest.  After all, one of the main duties of a king is to have a son to keep the line going.

They went on the Second Crusade together as penance, but the Crusade was a disaster.  On the way home, they stopped in Rome, where the pope formally forgave them for their "incest" and promised them a son.  The next year they had another daughter.

So Louis got the French bishops to annul their marriage (the pope was furious when he found out) and quickly married again.  He did eventually have a son, the future Philip II.  He seems to have expected Eleanor to retreat to a life of seclusion and contemplation.

Instead she too remarried.  Initially, on the way back to Aquitaine from Paris, she was pursued by half the unmarried nobles of France--and some of the married ones.  But she managed to outride them (think of the scene with Arwen and the Black Riders in the first "Lord of the Rings" movie).  But it was obvious she would only be safe if married.  She chose Henry, the young heir to Normandy and Anjou in western France, soon to become Henry II of England.  They went on to have five sons (and a couple of daughters), suggesting the failure of Louis and Eleanor to have sons was not her fault.

Politically, Aquitaine now was attached to the English crown, not the French one--an issue that caused tension throughout the rest of the Middle Ages, culminating in the Hundred Years War.  Interestingly, the new spouses Eleanor and Louis married after their divorce were also their third cousins.

Louis's son and heir, King Philip II of France, also had a messy divorce.  He went on the Third Crusade in 1189, got sick (perhaps malaria, there were lots of diseases in the Near East unknown in western Europe), and went home.  Shortly thereafter he married Ingeborg of Denmark, who actually was not his cousin.  But on their wedding night he took an inexplicable dislike to her, perhaps related to  his recent illness.

In the morning he declared they had not consummated their union and that the marriage should therefore be annulled.  Ingeborg, on the other hand, said that they had in fact performed the "copula carnalis" (on which click here), that she had been right there, it was not the sort of thing a girl was likely to be mistaken about.  The pope backed her up, but Philip refused to recognize her as his wife.  It took years, and France put under interdict, before they finally reached an amicable agreement and Philip married a different woman, who gave him a son.  This divorce case indicates the very strong medieval sense that marriage ought to be insoluble.

Interestingly, the church's emphasis from here on was on the permanence of marriage.  To avoid quite so many divorces like Louis's and Eleanor's, the number of "forbidden degrees" was reduced from 7 to 4 in 1214, meaning anyone related more distantly than third cousins could not claim divorce on the basis of incest.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more on medieval marriage and divorce, and so much more, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Royal Divorce in the Middle Ages

In a previous post I discussed medieval divorce.  Here I give a couple examples of famous divorces that helped shape medieval marriage and divorce law.

Marriage was just becoming a sacrament in the ninth century when King Lothar II decided to divorce his wife, Tetburgis, and instead marry Waldrada, his former concubine.  Tetburgis was of a much more powerful family than the relatively low-born Waldrada, so the marriage had made sense originally.  But after several years in which Tetburgis did not get pregnant--although Waldrada had produced a son for the king--Lothar decided to elevate the girl he'd always liked.

At this point the bishops jumped all over him.  Marriage was permanent, they said.  So Lothar had to find a way to get Tetburgis out of the way.  First she was bribed to say she wanted to become a nun and had never willingly given her oath of marriage in the first place, but this only worked until she changed her mind.  (Two centuries later, one spouse entering the church would have required both spouses to enter the church, but the ninth century was still figuring this out.)

Then Lothar accused Tetburgis of adultery.  When this did not win him the desired divorce, he upped it to incestuous adultery with her brother.  When even this didn't work, he tried incestuous adultery in an unnatural position which had made her give birth to a monstrous fetus, explaining why she couldn't get pregnant now.  Unfortunately, no one believed him.  The case involved bishops, the pope, other kings, and all the relatives.  Only Lothar's death ten years later ended the excitement.

Two centuries later, at the end of the eleventh century, King Philip I of France also ran into trouble when he tried to get a divorce.  He and his queen, Bertha of Holland, had successfully produced a son, the future Louis VI.  But then Philip took a dislike to Bertha and accused her of being "too fat."  This was rich, coming from Philip, who himself got so fat he was unable to ride a horse.  (Louis VI was later nicknamed "the Fat."  Hormones.)

Instead Philip hooked up with Bertrada, wife of the count of Anjou.  The count of Anjou was understandably furious and wrote a long treatise on the history of the counts of Anjou, whose subtext was that his family was wonderful and the royal line was degraded incompetents.  If this was supposed to win Bertrada back, it didn't work.  The bishops and eventually the pope also got on Philip's case.  He was even excommunicated at one point for refusing to listen to the church; being excommunicated did have the advantage of getting him out of going on the First Crusade.  Finally he promised the pope to give up Bertrada "right away."  In fact he did no such thing, but the pope was fighting the German king at this point and worrying about the Crusade, so he turned a blind eye, so Philip, Bertrada, and their children continued as a happy family.

Louis VI, who took over effective governance of France during the final years of his father's life, was not happy about this, however, especially since Bertrada apparently tried at one point to poison him.

Coming up soon, more royal divorces.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For medieval marriage, divorce, and so much more, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Medieval Divorce

In a previous post I talked about medieval marriage.  Now I want to discuss medieval divorce.

Theoretically one didn't get divorced in the Middle Ages,  However, it certainly happened.  Although all societies have formal ways for a couple to swear to be true to each other forever (e.g., marriage), they also all have ways to get out of a marriage that is, for whatever reason, just wrong.

In ancient Jewish law, adultery or barrenness in a woman were grounds for divorce.  In Roman and early medieval law, one could get out of a marriage if one's spouse dabbled in forbidden magic or was a despoiler of tombs.  A man could also divorce his wife for adultery, though it would be harder for her to bring similar charges against him.  You will note that "irreconcilable differences" was not grounds.  In fact, it did not become grounds until late in the twentieth century.

By the ninth century, churchmen had decided that marriage, as a quasi-sacrament (it did not become an official sacrament until the thirteenth century), ought to be permanent, insoluble.  The sacramental aspect of marriage was the oaths, swearing on all that was holy to stay together "till death do us part."  You don't just change your mind about an oath like that.

Oaths were supposed to have witnesses, to avoid denials later.  A couple who secretly swore their oaths to each other were still validly married, but because they had married in an illegal way, they had to do penance.

Thus the only way out of marriage was the discovery that you had not been validly married in the first place.  (Modern Catholicism still follows some version of this.)  If one of the couple's oaths was forced, not a free-will decision, then it didn't count (the so-called "shot-gun wedding" would not have been valid in the Middle Ages).  If it turned out that one of the pair was already married to somebody else, then the marriage was similarly annulled.  If the couple had not consummated their union physically, then they weren't really married. If someone had not been heard of for seven years they were presumed dead, and the spouse could remarry (though this was officially not divorce, but being assumed to be widowed).

But the easiest way out of marriage was to discover that a couple were actually cousins.  Also in the ninth century, when marriage was decided to be insoluble, churchmen decided that it would be incestuous to marry someone more closely related than "seven degrees," that is someone who shared any ancestors with you going back seven generations.  In practice, of course, everyone in the aristocracy, that is those likely to actually know who their ancestors were, was related to everyone.  Thus consanguinity ("shared blood") meant that an aristocratic couple determined to get a divorce could probably find some common ancestors and announce, with nicely modulated shock, that they had to split up.

For peasants, divorce was a lot easier.  You just moved out, and then everyone related to either half of the couple got involved in bitter wrangling.  As long as neither half of the couple remarried--or at least not without moving very far away first--the church neither knew nor cared.

Coming up soon--some celebrated medieval divorce cases.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For medieval marriage & divorce and so much more, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Medieval Marriage

Modern assumptions about marriage were created in the Middle Ages.  Ancient Judaism had assumed a powerful man would have multiple wives and probably a few handmaiden/concubines, but Christianity settled on one spouse per person.  But the idea of a Christian marriage really only developed in the sixth century.

Before then, Christians continued to follow Roman marriage practices, which assumed marriages were arranged by the male members of the family, and the wedding itself was a big, drunken party (we still have that part).  The chief way for the Romans to distinguish a wife from a concubine (concubines were fine) was that a wife brought a dowry to the marriage, and a concubine didn't.

By the ninth century, Christian marriage settled into the form it would keep for the next millennium.  Concubines were decided to be just wrong.  Once married, one was supposed to be married for life.  The only times divorce (really annulment) was allowed were when the couples hadn't "really" been married in the first place, if for example one of them was already married to somebody else, or they had been forced unwillingly into marriage, or, the biggie, they were too closely related.

"Too closely related," from the ninth century to the thirteenth, meant not sharing any ancestors seven generations back.  Since one's ancestors double with each generation, in practice this meant that everyone in roughly the same social circles was related to everyone, and the aristocracy could essentially get divorce on demand by comparing family trees.  Among the peasantry, however, no one really cared as long as the couple were more distantly related than first or second cousins.

Among the aristocracy, marriages were often arranged for political reasons, such as to cement alliances.  Among the peasantry, economic considerations played a big part.  But even if the couple's families had decided on the marriage, the couple did have to agree, and once married they were expected to love each other and stay true to each other.  Even men, who it was assumed would fool around before marriage and if widowed, were not supposed to cheat on their wives.

Starting in the twelfth century, the romances were all about love, about people meeting a (socially suitable) person of the opposite sex, falling in love, and getting married.  Not surprisingly, this ideal conflicted with what the parents had in mind.

By the twelfth century weddings were usually held on the church steps (not in the church itself), though marriage did not officially become a sacrament until the thirteenth century.  The couple would give their oaths, before witnesses, to stay true to each other for life and exchange rings as a symbol of this.  (This looks a lot like a modern wedding.)  They would then generally proceed into the church for the nuptial mass, the first time a priest was involved.

But the couple was not really married before the "copula carnalis," actually consummating their union.  If one skipped this step, it was grounds for annulment.  Wedding guests might "help out" by shouting tips through the window after the new couple was tucked in together.

(Click here to find out about medieval divorce.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For medieval marriage and so much more, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.