ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE, queen of France and afterward of England: b. 1122; d. Fontevrault, France, 1 April 1204. She was the eldest daughter and heiress of William IX, Duke of Guienne or Aquitaine, and was mar ried 2 Aug. 1137, to Prince Louis, who in the same year succeeded to the throne of France as Louis VII. She was gay, frivolous, a lover of poetry and art, and could not sympathize with the ascetic spirit of her husband. She accompanied him on the second crusade to the Holy Land in 1147. At that time he com plained of her preference for other men, and on their return from Asia they were divorced 18 March 1152. A short time afterward she bestowed her hand upon Henry Plantagenet, the future Henry II of England. This alliance, which made Henry master of Eleanor's vast possessions in France, produced pernicious and protracted wars between France and England. She bore him many children, but his infidelities and neglect changed her love into hatred. She
incited her sons Geoffrey and Richard Coeur de Lion to rebel against their father, was im prisoned in 1174, and remained in confinement until after Henry's death in 1189, when she was released by his successor, Richard I, who placed her at the head of the government on his departure for the Holy Land. She nego tiated his marriage with the daughter of the king of Navarre, and went to Germany with his ransom from captivity. She afterward re tired to the abbey of Fontevrault and surviving Richard, lived to see him succeeded by one of her other sons, John Lackland, the signer of Magna Charta. She was a favorite personage with the troubadour poets of the day and ap pears in a very different light in their works from that in which she is represented by French and Norman chroniclers. Consult Adams, 'History of England, (London 1905).