French and English Monarch. Duchess and heiress of Aquitaine and Gascogne, Countess of Poitou. Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine inherited the duchy of Aquitaine from her father in 1137. In the same year, on July 25., she married Louis of France. The couple was very different., Louis had been raised at a monastery and was very calm and she was a woman of independent spirit. In 1147 they both joined the Crusade. During their stay in Antioch she was suspected to have a liaison with her uncle Raymond de Poitiers, who reigned as Prince of Antioch, and she had to return to France alone. She gave birth to two daughters, Marie and Alix, that where later married to two brothers. In March 1152 she got divorced and married again in May the 19 year old Henry Plantagenet, which led to a scandal. With the divorce and remarriage Louis not only lost a wife, that he had apparently loved, but also her inheritance which considered of West and a large part of South France. In 1154 Henry became King and his sphere of influence extended thereby from Scotland to the Pyreneeses. Over the years they had 8 children. In the beginning the marriage seems to have been very happy, but later Henry started to have affairs. With much energy she made politics against her husband. In 1173 she encouraged her three oldest sons to rebel against him and to claim their inheritances early. In 1174 Henry defeated his sons and captured Eleonore. He imprisoned her for most of the following 16 years. She was released when the message of his death reached her prison. While Richard was in on the Crusade she reined the country very skilled. She traveled all her life governing her children's possession in France. In the Winter of 1199/1200 with the high age of 77 she travelled over the Pyreneeses to Castile to visit her daughter Aenor and accompany her granddaughter Blanca to France to marry the dauphin. In later years she more often retired to the Abbey of Fontevraud where she died and was buried beside her husband and two of her children. She had survived her husbands and eight of her ten children. During the Revolution her body was exhumed, her bones scattered and never recovered.
Bio by: Lutetia (findagrave.com)